


Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: Hotspots [2]
Category: Primeval
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-01-22
Packaged: 2018-03-08 16:30:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3215909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>King Arthur is apparently not a bridge too far, not for the anomaly team - not even in the run-up to Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fredbassett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fredbassett/gifts).



            Morris slept poorly. She managed perfectly well on a few hours, and got up when most people were still snoring in bed. Just at the moment, she was accustomed to getting up and navigating her way through the darkness, sliding her feet into boots and a jumper over her head and sneaking down to the breakfast room early in the morning. The youth hostel didn’t open for breakfast till six, and the student archaeologists were usually nowhere to be seen before seven-thirty, but there was an elderly coffee machine that dispensed endless cups of awful black coffee at any time. Morris headed straight for this.

 

            Most people thought four in the morning was a terrible time to drink coffee. Morris was aware of this. She was also aware that all the undergrads knew she got up at this time and thought she was mad, which was why it came as quite a surprise to find one of them down there, sitting on a plastic chair and looking miserable, curled around a cup of coffee.

 

            “Chloe?” Morris said, baffled. “What are you doing down here? You can’t possibly have been pulling an all-nighter, you don’t have an essay. Wait. Do you?”

 

            Chloe, a studious eighteen-year-old with purple hair, raised her head long enough to glower at her and then recognised her. “Oh. Um, hi, Morris. No. I don’t.”

 

            “So why are you...” Morris flicked her fringe out of her eyes and gesticulated vaguely. “...down here? It’s four o’clock, Chloe.”

 

             “I was out,” Chloe said defensively, and Morris looked more closely at her, noting the mud all down her jeans, smeared eyeliner and caked-on foundation, and also what looked suspiciously like tear-tracks. She knew the students liked the local pub down the hill from the hostel; she was less certain the local pub liked them, but a constant stream of revenue probably counted for something.

 

            “Oh,” Morris said. “So what about going out made you start crying?” She instantly thought of several possibilities and winced. “Are you okay?”

 

            Chloe gave her a look that said she knew exactly what Morris was thinking, and was judging her for it. “I’m fine, thanks. Just...” She winced herself. “It’s... you’ll laugh.”

 

            “I probably won’t,” Morris said truthfully, and punched the button for a black coffee on the coffee machine, absent-mindedly sliding her chipped and stained coffee mug under the spout.

 

            “Well,” Chloe said slowly, “you know some of the others have been talking about... well, seeing – things?”

 

            “Yes,” Morris said, equally slowly.

 

            Chloe took a deep breath. “It was – funny. When they were talking about seeing, you know, horsemen, and mythical beasts and stuff, I just thought they were hammered. But tonight, I was walking back up the hill, and...”

 

            There was a long silence, tense like strung wire in the cold breakfast room.

 

            Morris drew up a plastic chair next to Chloe, rested her elbows comfortably on her knees, and looked sideways at the younger woman through round-rimmed glasses. “And?” she prompted.

 

            “There was this really funny – like, shiny light. And a man sort of – fell through it and yelled at me, and he was – I’m not kidding, he was wearing chainmail, and all covered in blood and stuff.” Chloe fell silent for a moment, then swallowed. “So I ran away and came back over the fields.”

 

            Morris said nothing for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. “Did he hurt you?” she asked at last.

 

            Chloe shook her head violently. “No. It was like he was telling me to – to run away. It sounded a bit like that.”

 

            “O-kay,” Morris said slowly. “Well, that’s...”

 

            “...Weird?” Chloe filled in mournfully.

 

            “Let’s go with that,” Morris said, and scrubbed a hand through her short hair. “Look, Chloe. Can you write down everything you saw for me? And the rough times and things like that?”

 

            Chloe nodded.

 

            “Do that. I’ll... maybe drop in at the station, tomorrow.” Morris frowned. “And you get some sleep, okay? I believe you, but Professor Redford won’t. Actually, you know what? Pull a sickie. I’ll cover for you.”

 

            Chloe grinned and put aside her coffee mug. Morris cast a practised eye at it, and decided that the contents were probably stone cold. “Thanks, Morris.”

 

            “No problem,” Morris said, and waited for Chloe to go away and come back with a pad of paper and a biro, and start scribbling. Then she wandered out into the hall, pulled her heavy coat off the pegs, and went outside.

 

            She took her phone from an inside pocket, and called the only other person she knew who was likely to be up at that hour. It rang a couple of times, and then he picked up, calm and warm-voiced despite the time, and she knew she hadn’t woken him.

 

            “Hi, Beck,” Morris said, and smiled. “How are you? Yeah... yeah. Same as always. Just. You know. Wanted a chat.”

 

***

 

            To the surprise of all, Captain Becker appeared to have magically developed a personal life. All right, so he was sitting in the rec room at four in the morning cleaning guns, but he was also chatting to someone on speakerphone, someone with a soft-edged, slightly vague Midlands voice.  He even appeared to be enjoying himself. This was grapevine gold, without a doubt, and the duty technician – who should have been at the ADD but wasn’t, for caffeine-related reasons – strained to listen in.

 

            “… you know what students are like,” Becker’s unknown friend was sighing. “I have to watch them all the time, and some of them… well, they’re just a bit cack-handed, Beck.”

 

            “Not everyone has your innate grace with a trowel, Morris,” Becker said, a little distant with his tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on his work.

 

            “Shut up,” Morris said warmly, and then sighed again. Mentally, the technician was weighing up the odds of Morris being a girlfriend – although Morris definitely didn’t sound like a girl’s name, the voice was a woman’s. “And they get pissed at the pub. I can’t stop them. But hangovers don’t optimise excavation, you know?”

 

            “Don’t I just,” Becker murmured soothingly, hitting a harmonic that made the technician unilaterally decide that Morris was _not_ his girlfriend after all, and that next time Becker broke his computer she would be the one fixing it – in return for a small fee. Drinks and attempted seduction should do it.

 

            “And then. Well. I don’t know how to say this, Beck. I thought they were just a bit drunk and – well, undergrads. But Chloe’s quite sensible, and she did look genuinely shocked, and… well… why would you make up men in chainmail?”

 

            Becker almost knocked his bottle of gun oil over. “Excuse me?”

 

            “Men in chainmail. Well, man, singular. Chloe says she was coming back from the village last night and she bumped into someone wearing chainmail, speaking gibberish, and covered in blood. Apparently he’d popped out of some sort of sparkly light.”

 

            Stunned silence fell on the rec room like a battleaxe. The technician stared at Becker, who was himself gazing into the middle distance with his jaw hanging slightly.

 

            “And she seemed pretty sober when I talked to her,” Morris persisted unhappily, “and this isn’t the first time, and the stories of a giant beast were a bit dumb and I _knew_ they had to be making up the bits about knights in shining armour. For God’s sake, Beck, I think they think I’m _stupid_ , but I really ought to speak to the police.”

 

            “Yeah, do that,” Becker said, clearly coming back to earth. “Yeah. That would be a great idea. See if anything like that has happened before. Call me back, if it has, or if you see the sparkly light again, or – look, Morris, this might be important. Don’t let anyone know that you know that. Don’t even tell Professor Redford. But if you see anything, then get everyone indoors and call me before you call the police.”

 

            There was a short pause. “You’re doing that thing again where you don’t make any sense,” Morris said at last. “Dire warnings and stuff don’t suit you.”

 

            “Morris?”

 

            “Yeah?”

 

            “No melodrama, no jokes, no arsing around. This is a big deal. Promise me you’ll do what I asked.”

 

            Another brief silence. “Okay. But what...? Beck, seriously, what do I do about this?”

 

            “I’m going to have a chat with my boss, we’ll see what we can do,” Becker said, packing up his stuff. “Go to the police. Then sit tight and wait for me to call you, unless something happens. In which case, forget sitting tight and call me. Got that?”

 

            “Yes.” Morris hesitated. “Talk soon?”

 

            “Definitely,” Becker said, and cut the call, tucking the phone into his pocket and picking up his armful of lethal weaponry. He gave the duty technician a look which neatly encapsulated scepticism and a perfect awareness that she was just hanging around for her own amusement, and wandered off.

 

            The technician sighed, flipped the kettle on, and promptly fused the lights in half the ARC.

 

 

 

            Ryan was not quite sure where he stood with Captain Becker. Becker was frighteningly young and starched, but his record spoke volumes, and every now and then the pole up the lad’s arse slipped and revealed an endearingly wry sense of humour that meant the scientists didn’t dislike him quite as much as they disliked every other new military hire. And Becker was also prepared to continue playing cat and mouse with that demented ex-copper who persisted in ‘testing the ARC’s security’. The more used to the ARC he got, the safer a pair of hands he got, too, however much Lyle mumbled about kids in short trousers. He was hardworking, good at running interference with Lester, and played a mean game of poker - but that excellent poker face made it hard to tell where Becker stood on the ARC’s unconventional office fraternisation habits, and Ryan wasn’t sure he’d even scratched the surface of Becker’s personality. He maintained as careful a guard around Becker as Becker maintained around him, neither of them giving much away, on the grounds that you can always give more, but it’s hard to take back.

 

            So he was justifiably irritated when Becker – who had had the night shift and should be gone by now – popped up at the door to his office and waited self-effacingly while Stephen, destined for a day of thrashing out paperwork at the hospital with Cutter, kissed Ryan goodbye. This was an important operation, and one they both devoted considerable time to. Ryan did not like having it interrupted by suddenly realising that a junior colleague was lurking not six feet away, eyes politely fixed on a blank bit of wall.

 

            “Becker,” he snapped, as Stephen grinned unrepentantly and disappeared out the door. “What are you still doing here?”

 

            Becker didn’t jump a foot in the air. There was no justice in the world. “Sir. I got a call from one of my old friends, she’s working as forewoman on an excavation in Cornwall, and I think she’s seen a recurring anomaly. Or at least, one of the student excavators has.”

 

            Ryan blinked and sat down, irritation disappearing under professional concerns. “Explain.”

 

            “Morris called me at four o’clock this morning. Not because she’d seen the anomaly then; Morris is usually up at four in the morning. She’s in the middle of her PhD and her supervisor is Neil Redford…”

 

            Becker said the name like he expected Ryan to know who he meant. Ryan dug through the further reaches of his memory and recalled a TV show that had finished a few weeks previously – _The Archaeology of Arthur_ , or something like that. The matching book was all over the place, well-promoted with a glossy cover and a fetching series of shots from the series, clearly intended for the Christmas present market. “King Arthur bollocks.”

 

            Becker nodded. “He’s got an excavation in a place called Castle Killibury, and thinks he’s found remnants of an Arthurian court.”

 

            “Has he?”

 

            Becker wrinkled his patrician nose. “Probably not. He’s like Andrea Carandini – Carandini does Roman archaeology, but the principle’s the same. Great excavator. Dubious interpretation.”

 

            Ryan sat back and folded his arms, silently urging Becker to get to the point.

 

            Becker took the hint. “Anyway, he’s got a bunch of students working with him on this dig, and Morris is corralling them, making sure they don’t screw everything up. The students spend a lot of time in the local, according to Morris, and when they started telling funny stories about beasts of legend and other bullshit she thought they were just drunk and taking the piss. Then she came down for coffee this morning, and one of the students was there, in a bit of a state. The kid said that she’d been coming back up to the youth hostel, and had met a man dressed in chainmail and blood and talking gibberish. And that he’d popped out of a sparkly light.”

 

            Ryan tapped his fingers on the desk. It did sound promising, but there was one major flaw in it; there had been no anomalies outside the Home Counties, barring the usual jiggery-pokery in the Forest of Dean, for the last week. He pointed this out to Becker.

 

            “It’s a mobile phone black spot,” Becker countered. “I can’t call Morris unless she’s on top of a hill. I understand that affects the ADD’s ability to pick up anomaly signatures.”

 

            “That’s been a problem with Cornish anomalies before,” Ryan acknowledged cautiously. “Any photos or video?”

 

            “I can ask,” Becker said. “But if Morris didn’t believe the students before, then there wasn’t any convincing proof.” 

 

            Ryan thought about this for a second. “Is Morris reliable?”

 

            “Rock-solid, sir.”

 

            Ryan nodded, and wondered if the best approach to this problem would be having a quiet word with Lester – a contingency which would involve ringing up Miss Wickes and asking her what sort of a mood Lester was in, since this sounded sufficiently like a wild-goose chase that whoever brought it to Lester’s attention was liable to get their head bitten off – or sounding out Becker’s friend himself.

 

            Becker shifted in his seat. “If I could make a suggestion, sir,” he said.

 

            Ryan gave him a sharp look. “Go ahead.”

 

            “I have tomorrow off. I was planning to go and see Morris anyway.”

 

            “Is she a close friend of yours?” Ryan said, unable to resist needling. The ARC had had a destructive influence on his respect for other people’s right not to be gossiped about.

 

            “Yes, sir,” Becker said, in a tone faintly tinged with the weariness of having answered similar questions many times before. “And no, sir. She isn’t my girlfriend.”

 

            “I wasn’t going to ask,” Ryan lied sternly, and got a clear look from Becker’s brown eyes that showed Becker knew quite well that that had been a rotten lie. Ryan met him stare for stare, and told him he was perfectly welcome to go to Cornwall, and any impressions he gathered might be of interest to the boffins, but that this was a strictly unofficial fact-finding mission and if Becker scared any birds out of any trees, Ryan would hand him over to Miss Lewis without a second thought.

 

            “Understood, sir,” Becker said, wincing slightly. It looked to Ryan’s experienced eye as if it was for show, but it might have been real; Jenny Lewis and her ruthless approach to PR petrified most people.

 

            “Good,” Ryan said, an unspoken dismissal, and watched as Becker removed himself smartly from the room, hopefully to head home and get some sleep. The ARC didn’t need another workaholic, although it wasn’t clear whether Becker actually was one or not yet – there hadn’t been enough minor crises since he’d arrived to be really sure. In fact, Ryan was pretty certain that when it came to Becker, none of them was sure of anything.

 

            _Understood, indeed. I wonder how much anyone understands you_ , Ryan thought.

 

He didn’t say it aloud.


	2. Chapter 2

            Early December in St Mabyn, Cornwall, was bright and sunny but bloody cold, thanks to a truly impressive wind chill factor. Becker stuffed his hands into his pockets and wondered what kind of idiot archaeology student agreed to fulfil their compulsory excavation requirement in the middle of winter, then concluded that it was probably the sort of idiot archaeology student who looked up to Professor Redford as to a major deity. Professor Redford himself was sinking in Becker’s esteem the more he thought about the practicalities of conducting an excavation so late in the year. But doubtless Redford knew better than pig-headed soldiers who had never actually studied archaeology proper in the first place – and Becker had watched _The Archaeology of Arthur_ , and knew that Redford considered the pursuit of Arthurian archaeology a sacred quest akin to the search for the Holy Grail, something the weather wouldn’t deter him from. He stamped his feet on the ground, thought idly that at least it wasn’t actually frosty, and waited patiently for Morris.

 

            She had said to meet beside the Tesco’s. He was sure of it. And he hadn’t actually seen Morris for more than half a year, but he was pretty certain that Morris and her insistence on good time-keeping and precision in arrangements hadn’t  changed at all in that time. When he was due a four-thirty phone call from her, the phone always rang at four-twenty-nine. He might have changed, but Morris wouldn’t have done.

 

            Thank God for Morris, he thought, and murmured it to himself, at which point he spotted Morris across the street and made a death-defying dash in front of a muddied Land Rover to collide with her, just on the edge of the other pavement.

 

            “You’re all right, then,” Morris observed, deadpan as ever and slightly off the floor. Becker put her back down and grinned at her.

 

            “I’m all right,” he agreed.

 

            “Better than you were before,” Morris prodded.

 

            “Better than I was before,” Becker conceded, and slung an arm around her shoulders, bypassing that subject as quickly as possible. “God, it’s good to see you. Where do I buy you a coffee around here?”

 

            Morris pointed out a very stereotypical café selling Cornish Tea’s, and they shared a judgemental look over the grammar. “I know,” Morris said, “but seriously, _great_ scones.”

 

            “I’ll take your word for it,” Becker said, taking in the unnecessarily curlicued writing, the pink gingham curtains in the café’s window and a faint glimpse of twee decoration inside. “Morris, these had better be some fantastic scones. Isn’t there a pub or something?”

 

            “There’s one outside St Mabyn, yeah,” Morris said, and gave him the kind of owlish look that always preceded the laying down of the law according to Morris. “I’m taking you there for lunch.”

 

            Becker caved. “Fine, then.”

 

            In the end they wound up with a pot of tea to share and two massive scones. Becker hacked his in half and spread it liberally with jam, while Morris smothered hers methodically in clotted cream and started eating.

 

            “Will the excavation go without you?” he said eventually.

 

            “Neil promised me the day off,” Morris said, which wasn’t really an answer to the question. “He said it would be OK. I don’t think it will, but, you know. It was kind of him.”

 

            “Even postgrads aren’t supposed to work weekends,” Becker said severely, knowing this was only about half true. “How’s the thesis?”

 

            Morris nodded absently. “Good. Good. I want to get some serious work done on it over Christmas, but it’ll be ready to defend next year. I think. I hope.” She grimaced, and tapped the table.

 

            Becker articulated something that had been niggling at him since he’d called up Morris to ask if she wanted to go for a drink and catch up and she’d explained that she was in Cornwall. “This won’t be helping it. Why are you working all the way out here?”

 

            “Neil’s paying me to do it,” Morris said defensively, and Becker, who had known her for eight years and counting, caught something very familiar in the tone of her voice and the slight flush on her pale cheeks.

 

            He stared disbelievingly. “ _Morris_.”

 

            “What?” Morris coloured further, and Becker got a distinct sinking feeling. It might not be as reliable as Lieutenant Lyle’s thumbs, but when it came to romance hitting the rocks, it was pin-point accurate. He had several contingency plans in place for when the Temple-Maitland arrangement, whatever it was, fell apart.

 

            “Tell me that’s all it is. The job.”

 

            Morris promptly lost herself in a tangle of half-sentences, in which the words ‘professional respect’, ‘always greatly admired’, and ‘of course’ got into such a sorry muddle that Becker’s head spun and he wished despairingly for the ARC’s straightforward, if soap-opera like, attitude to romantic entanglements. By the time he’d disentangled the simpler statements Morris had made, his best friend was practically glowing with mortification and a disquieting hint of something else.

 

            “Morris. This is an unbelievably shitty idea and you know it.” Becker intercepted a stern look from the café’s proprietor and brushed it off; it had nothing on Major Ryan’s glare or Miss Lewis’s acid smile. “You can’t possibly have gone and fallen in love with your supervisor.”

 

            “I’m not in love,” Morris protested. “I’m not, I swear.”

 

            Becker pinched the bridge of his nose. “If you’re not, you’re bloody close to it. Please tell me you haven’t slept with him.”

 

            “Of course I bloody well haven’t!” Morris said, and emptied half the sugar-bowl into his tea.

 

            Becker took a defiant bite of his scone and ignored his now-undrinkable tea. Morris was ranting at length about her pride in her work and her determination to do nothing that would compromise that, and how Beck really ought to know her better, how he did know her better, how she wasn’t going to do anything stupid, but…

 

            Becker sucked strawberry jam off his fingers and let that _but_ linger in the air.

 

            “… I have a problem,” Morris admitted unhappily, removing her glasses and tangling her fingers in her thick, sandy hair, angry red slowly leaking from her face. “A huge problem. But I can deal with it, okay?”

 

            Becker took her other hand and squeezed. “I know you can. And it’s not like I can talk.”

 

            “Not after whatshisname. Quinn. The copper.”

 

            “Him,” Becker said, remembering the last time he’d had a really long conversation with Morris, the sort that only happened when one of them had something painful to talk about. It had been all of a month ago, which was embarrassing, and it had been entirely down to Quinn. “That was a bad idea. The only saving grace is that he isn’t my actual boss and my actual boss encourages me to override him in the field, because, well – he’s a cowboy who thinks he can save the world.”

 

            “It was a dreadful idea. I hope the sex was good, at least.”

           

            “Middling to okay,” Becker said truthfully. “Didn’t live up to the promise of sexy encounters in the air conditioning vents.”

 

Morris inhaled her scone, clotted cream and all, and sputtered a giggle. He smiled in response, but added seriously: “If my colleagues do end up coming here, the Quinn thing never happened, all right? Nobody knows. It wasn’t anything more than a couple of nights in bed and a weekend or two, and you were right about him anyway. Waste of space.”

 

            “I’m always right,” Morris said, sounding calmer, and visibly pulled herself together. Becker spared a moment to do the same. “Right. You want to see the site and the hostel, and meet Chloe. Yes?”

 

            Becker nodded. “And then we can get lunch. Did you walk into St Mabyn?”

 

            Morris nodded. “It’s a nice walk. Forty minutes, maybe.”

              

            Becker retrieved his car keys from his pocket. “I’ve got my car.”

 

            “Try the walk another time?” Morris said hopefully.

 

            Becker felt a minor pang of guilt. He’d been back in the UK for the best part of a year and had seen Morris only once, and while Morris was notoriously uncomplaining he knew that she’d probably missed him as much as he’d missed her. “If I can get time off,” he prevaricated, thinking dark thoughts about the ARC’s destructive effect on outside work social lives.

 

            “Mum keeps asking me if you’re coming for Christmas this year,” Morris wheedled. “You know she thinks of you as a slightly more tormented Freddie…”

 

            The mention of Morris’s teenaged brother, a particularly grumpy specimen who Becker had helped Morris drag out of bed by the ankles on more than one occasion, brought a small smile to Becker’s face. “If I can get time off,” he repeated, and paused to chew over his words. “Being the new guy at work – I don’t know if I get Christmas off. It might be more like New Year. Would that be okay?”

 

            “Of course,” Morris said, and beamed. “Yes! Finally. I knew I’d get you back into the fold somehow.”

 

            Becker grinned, and opened the car door for her. “You know I’m in this for your dad’s cooking, right?”

 

            “Duh,” Morris said, and climbed into his car. “This is new.”

 

            “It’s not bad,” Becker said, drawing smoothly out of his parking place. “Now. Directions, please. I can’t find Castle Killibury in my satnav.”

 

            Morris shut her eyes, obviously thinking, then opened them and began to speak.

 

 

            About twenty minutes later, Becker pulled up outside the youth hostel and parked. It was a generously-sized, practical-looking building, clearly aimed at adventure-holiday types. The paint was cracking and the car park almost empty, except for a couple of unbelievably battered jeeps marked with the archaeology department’s logo. To Becker’s critical eye, it looked a little down on its luck, and he wondered how much business it got up here, at the top of a hill with an admittedly beautiful view and closest to a picture-postcard hamlet even tinier than St Mabyn, possessed of a pub, a post office, some picturesque cottages, and not much else.

 

            “I think the owners want to turn it into a hotel soon,” Morris said, reading his mind as usual. “Most people who are out for adventure holidays would rather have the seaside, and Cornwall’s really fashionable now.”

 

            “The owners?”

 

            “Mabel and Hugo Cavendish-Lytton. Killibury’s on their land, and they’re the ones who invited Neil – Professor Redford to excavate here, two years ago. They’re very, very keen, and very, very rich.” Morris let herself into the youth hostel. “Hugo’s got family money, mostly tied up in land – he owns the St. Kew golf course. Mabel made her money in insurance, and actually kept it after the crunch, unlike everyone else. She lives and breathes numbers and risks. Hugo lives and breathes ancient history, and Arthur is his _thing_.” Morris pronounced it with instinctive distaste. “They’re huge fans of N- Professor Redford’s, and they’re backing the excavation. Not all of it, Mabel’s too careful for that, but a _lot_. And we have some funding, and Professor Redford pays the rest. He’s sure Killibury – or Kelliwic, that’s the proper name if he’s right – is going to be the next big thing in Arthurian archaeology. Not the final piece of the puzzle, but close to.”

 

            Becker noticed her stumbling over Redford’s name, but decided to be nice and say nothing. “So why is Mabel being cautious? And why can’t you get enough funding to pay the rest of the excavation? It’s not a big dig, is it?”

 

            Morris hesitated in the hall. “No. It’s not.”

 

            Becker stuck his hands in his pockets.

 

            “We’re not all sure,” Morris said, not meeting his eyes, “if the professor is right about Killibury. I mean, me and the other postgrads. There is an occupation layer from the right period, it looks pretty good, but there’s nothing to say that it’s Kelliwic. Or that Arthur was ever involved. If there was an Arthur.”

 

            She gave Becker a look that said _let’s not talk about this any more_ , and Becker relented. Morris scraped her teeth over her full bottom lip, and said: “Chloe’s upstairs. The student I told you about. She’s sprained her ankle.”

 

            “Really?”

 

            Morris winced. “Yes. She was going to fake it, but then she fell down the stairs a bit too artistically.”

 

            “Does Redford not know about the stories the students are telling?”

 

            “He thinks it’s rubbish,” Morris said quietly, and led Becker upstairs without further commentary. She stopped before a door painted yellow and knocked. Inside, someone got up and limped over, then opened the door; Becker found himself looking down at a pixie of a girl, no more than eighteen, with sharp eyes and a tangle of purple hair. She had a crutch tucked under one arm, and was clearly favouring one foot.

 

            “Beck,” Morris said, “this is Chloe Aarons. Chloe, this is Captain Becker. He’s my oldest friend, so play nicely.”

 

            “Nice to meet you,” Chloe said, giving Becker a surprised and appreciative glance. Becker felt one of his eyebrows twitch involuntarily, but managed to plaster a bland look onto his face in time to shake hands.

 

            “Morris tells me you saw something interesting a couple of nights ago,” Becker said as mildly as he could, taking a seat on one of the narrow beds inside the room, opposite Chloe.

 

            The girl nodded. “I wrote it down for Morris.”

           

            “I know,” Becker said. “I want to hear it from you.”

 

            Chloe was flirty, but clear and sensible. As Becker listened to her re-telling her story, he had the strong impression that she knew she’d witnessed something interesting but wasn’t sure how significant it was, or if it was significant. He let his eyes drift to Morris, and knew that what Chloe was saying was consistent with what she had told the postgrad, and that Morris thought it fit the evidence. Becker hadn’t seen the place where Chloe claimed to have seen a man dressed in chainmail who spoke to her in a language she didn’t know, behaving as if he wanted her to run away for her own safety, but Morris had promised to show him.

 

            As Chloe ran out of steam, he stopped her gently. “Thanks, Miss Aarons. That’s very helpful of you. I hope your ankle’s okay?”

 

            “Oh, it’s fine,” Chloe said cheerfully. “It’s not a bad sprain. And you should totally call me Chloe, you’re not that much older than me.”

 

            “I’ll bear that in mind, Miss Aarons,” Becker said dryly. He glanced over at Morris, and correctly divined the meaning of the look on her face. “I think Morris wants a word. I’ll leave you two.”

 

            He got up and left, letting the door almost close behind him.

 

            “… _dead_ fit,” Chloe said appreciatively. “Get in, Morris!”

 

            “Beck is like family to me,” Morris said repressively. “Listen, Chloe. About Professor Redford…”

 

            “He doesn’t need to know, right?” Chloe supplied.

 

            “Not yet. It’s not definite. I’d really appreciate it if you kept this to yourself. Beck’s just a friend of mine who’s come to visit me, okay?”

 

            “Cool,” Chloe shrugged.

 

            “Thanks, Chloe.” Becker heard bedsprings creak as Morris got up. “I’m going down to the dig now. Is there anything you need from downstairs?”

 

            “No, I’m fine.”

 

            Morris rejoined Becker outside the room, and they moved quietly downstairs.

 

            “She’s a good kid,” Becker said neutrally.

 

            Morris grinned sideways. “Well, you can’t fault her taste in men.”

 

            “I can fault her flirting skills,” Becker said severely. “Well below par. But she’ll learn.”

 

            Morris nodded. “She’s a competent excavator, too,” she said with judicious approval. “I like her. Anyway.”

 

            She led Becker out the door and down the hill, along the ten-minute walk into the village with a brief pause to show him the spot where Chloe claimed to have seen a stranger, and another ten minutes into the countryside, along a tarmac road with dirt at the edges, until they reached Castle Killibury.

 

            It wasn’t a hugely impressive site, half of it almost flattened by ploughing and even partially built over by some derelict grey buildings, the other half largeish but not otherwise distinguished, with two rings of earthen embankments long smoothed over by grass and topped by scraggly bushes. There was a finds tent and a lot of plastic boxes off to one side. Three trenches had been dug, one at what seemed to be the eastern entrance, two in the centre of the fort, and they were surrounded by the usual paraphernalia of plastic mats, striped sticks, trowels, and surveyor’s tripods that Becker recognised as essential to every excavation, but it wasn’t that that caught his eye. It was the bloody great footprints running straight through the fort, the distraught and yelling people, and the sodding _huge_ anomaly whirling in the air.

 

            Becker checked his phone. Not a single bar of signal.

 

            “Just perfect,” he said wearily. “Just fucking perfect.”


	3. Chapter 3

            James Lester was enjoying the tail end of a leisurely lunch when his work phone went off, precipitating an immediate icing of the atmosphere. Lyle, who had been playing footsie under the table for his own amusement, cursed and grabbed the phone before Lester could. “What?” he barked, and even Lester heard the blast of crisp, patrician tones he received in return.

 

            Lyle didn’t look chastened, but he did fling the phone across the table to Lester. “It’s Captain Becker,” he said.

 

            Lester frowned. Ryan had mentioned that Becker was combining a trip to a friend’s place with a quiet investigation of something potentially important in the back end of Cornwall, but Ryan had also mentioned that he thought it likely to be a storm in a teacup, a students’ joke that had got out of hand and tricked Becker’s friend into thinking something genuinely hairy was going on. “Captain,” Lester said coolly. “You’re having a pleasant Saturday, I trust? So was I.”

 

            “Lucky you, sir,” Becker said, a distinctly crisp edge to his voice. “I was, and then a bloody great thing with too many teeth went charging through a dig swiftly followed by half the cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it _is_ out in the country with no mobile signal but there were students with smartphones and some of them have taken some pretty clear footage, and the professor in charge has media clout and I had to pinch his phone to stop him calling a staff writer at the _Telegraph_ , and I could do with some back-up, sir.”

 

            Lester blinked rapidly. “How enlivening, captain. Have you notified the ARC yet? And, seeing that it’s the weekend, have you called Ryan and Quinn yet?”

 

            “Major Ryan, yes,” Captain Becker said tightly. “Look, kid, I _told_ you, fuck off, you’re not getting your phone back until I – oh for fuck’s _sake_.” There was a thump and a clatter, and Becker got back on the phone, slightly out of breath. “Sorry, sir. Students don’t like it when you nick their phones and some of them are a bit up themselves, to be frank. I did call Quinn. A duty sergeant picked up the phone. He’s literally just been nicked for speeding. I could hear him in the background.”

 

            Lester sighed, scribbling notes on a sheet of paper Lyle had stuffed under his hand. “That man is more trouble than he’s worth.”

 

            “Yessir. I called the ARC, they said they’d have the team out as soon as possible, but I thought I ought to notify you. Sir. Yes, Professor Redford, I am speaking to my superior. I’d hand you over but he has to take a call from the Home Secretary, and I – yes. Yes, I did hit one of your students.  No, it was not unprovoked. Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to sit down and calm down. I can’t at present be of assistance. My immediate priority is prote- no, sir. I require my phone urgently.”

 

            “You sound as if you’re having fun, captain,” Lester remarked, unable to resist.

 

            “You will have your little jokes, sir,” Becker said, apparently through gritted teeth.

 

            “They lighten the daily grind. Where are, ah - the ‘bloody great thing with too many teeth and half the cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ now?”

 

                “I wish I knew,” Becker said. “I didn’t see either, only the tracks and chaos they left behind. My first priority was removing fifteen civilians and eyewitnesses on foot to safer ground. I called the police, but I suspect they wrote me off as a nutcase.”

 

            “It wouldn’t be the first time. You seem to have the situation well in hand, captain. I will have a team with you shortly.”

 

            “Including Miss Lewis?” Becker asked, a distinctly plaintive note in his voice.

 

            Despite the seriousness of the situation, Lester smirked. “Including Miss Lewis. Carry on, captain.”

 

            “Yessir.”

 

            Lester put the phone down and looked at Lyle, sitting across the table from him and rocking back on his chair.

 

            Lyle raised his eyebrows. “Is Captain Hairspray getting his feet wet, then?”

 

            “Captain Hairspray is knee-deep in rising floodwater,” Lester said rather grimly. “And so are we. Jon, I need to make a lot of calls. And to get to the ARC. Can you tell Liz-”

 

            “Yeah, of course,” Lyle said. His face softened slightly, and as he got up he rested a hand on Lester’s arm, looking resigned. “She won’t mind.”

 

            “ _I_ mind,” Lester said, more peevishly than he meant to. He’d wanted to spend a proper chunk of time with his daughter this weekend, hating the way the demands of his job kept him away from her even in the run-up to Christmas. He’d seen the way her face lit up when he’d brought home an Advent calendar for her, just because it meant he’d remembered. He was good at remembering, but too often bad at acting on his memory and actually making it to the event in question. 

 

            He had meant to go Christmas shopping with Liz and Lyle this afternoon. Now he would spend the afternoon, the evening, and probably most of the night mopping up a burgeoning catastrophe in bloody _Cornwall_.

 

            He leaned into Lyle for a moment of peace and quiet, letting the other man take his weight. Lyle ran a hand down his back and pressed his lips to the top of Lester’s head, then let him go and headed for Liz’s room.

 

            Lester took a deep breath and looked down at his scrawled list. He sent a brief mass text to Connor, Abby, and Stephen Hart, checking that they had been apprised of the situation, and called the ARC to authorise the use of a helicopter. Remembering Becker’s comment about the cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he called Sarah Page and informed her that any information she had on Arthurian legends related to Cornwall would be of use. He informed his PA, with some regrets, that her presence would be required at the ARC. He did not care to speculate on the quiet commentary in the background of his last phone call, and wouldn’t have bothered to place a bet on whether or not Corporal Richards would be accompanying Lorraine to the office, regardless of whether he was on the reserve roster for this weekend. 

 

            Immediate contingencies provided for, he rang Jenny. She had probably already been informed, but it was as well to be sure.

 

            “Jenny. So sorry to disturb you on a weekend.”

 

            “No problem, James.” Jenny sounded as if she was on the move. “We’ve all been disturbed. Is it as bad as it sounds?”

 

            “I suspect it’s worse,” Lester said. “I’ve just authorised a helicopter. Are you on your way to the ARC?”

 

            “Almost there,” Jenny said.

 

            “Meet the team there and go with them. I want you on that helicopter. This one looks like a PR disaster in the making – I left Captain Becker wrangling students and a stroppy professor who he says has friends in the media. Lorraine can handle the co-ordination, but we need you on the ground.”

 

            “When’s the helicopter due in?”

 

            “I haven’t the faintest idea, Jenny. Improvise.” Lester ended the call and looked across the room at his daughter, who was wearing an inscrutable expression and a ghastly Christmas jumper. Lester supposed that Lyle’s mother had been experimenting with knitting, probably in an attempt to sear her unofficial son-in-law’s eyeballs right out of his skull. He had not previously been aware that that violently green shade of wool existed.

 

            “Liz,” he said, and heard defeat in his own voice. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

 

            Liz shrugged one-shouldered, and came over to hug him. “It’ll be fine.” She gave him a cheeky grin. “I have other shopping to do. Shopping you don’t get to know about.”

 

            “Should I be concerned?” Lester said, taking the opportunity to cuddle his daughter, who shot a dry look up at him that suggested she knew exactly what was going on but nonetheless put up with the parental display of affection.

 

            “No,” Liz said decidedly, and extricated herself. “Seriously, Dad. It’s fine.”

 

            Lester took a deep breath, and bit back words like ‘no, it isn’t’. “Liz?”

 

            “Hmm?”

 

            “No-one in the history of the world has ever had a more forgiving daughter.”

 

            Liz sniffed, hiding a smile. “Bugger off, then. See you later.”

 

            Lester caught Lyle’s eye. _Aww_ , Lyle mouthed, grinning.

 

            “See you later,” Lester echoed, and left, Lyle on his heels.

 

            Behind him, Liz folded her arms and watched them go, her face a perfect blank once more.

 

***

              

            The team drew up outside the youth hostel and poured out of borrowed jeeps, all their own equipment that couldn’t be carried still on its way to Cornwall. Stephen saw Jenny glance around, collecting the group with her eyes, ticking them off on her usual mental checklist. Sometimes he noticed her counting them in and out of a room, although he wasn’t sure whether it was because she really wanted to make sure they were safe or because she wanted them under her eye, where PR faux pas couldn’t be committed. Stephen had heard her on the subject of Danny Quinn and his adrenaline problems; for vitriol, if not vocabulary, she rivalled Ryan’s comments.

 

            Stephen smiled automatically, and examined the hostel they were heading into, Jenny leading the charge. All the lights were on despite the fact that the weak winter sunlight was only just beginning to die and the hostel was ideally placed to catch the last of it, and the sullen, sulking atmosphere was palpable.

 

            Becker met them on the doorstep, looking frazzled; several hairs were actually out of place, and there was a tight set to his jaw that Stephen had never seen before. Stephen was almost tempted to take a sneaky picture for Ryan’s benefit, but – for the first time since he’d met Becker – he actually felt a little wary of the man. Becker always seemed calm and in control, but now he was in control and really pissed off. This was a deviation from normal behaviour and, as with all deviations from the normal, Stephen intended to approach it with care.

 

            “Thank fuck you’re here,” Becker said with feeling, and a cross-looking gentleman erupted into the hostel hall and tried to shoulder past him. Without so much as changing expression, Becker grabbed the back of the intruder’s jacket and wrenched him back several steps so that he remained a polite distance from Miss Lewis. “Miss Lewis, may I introduce Professor Neil Redford, one of the most distinguished leading lights of British archaeology?”

 

            Stephen felt a small smile quirk at his lips, both at the sarcasm Becker was laying on with a trowel, and the beetroot shade of Professor Redford’s countenance. Behind the archaeologist he noticed a young woman with glasses and a hopeless expression, clearly older than the undergrads, and felt a pang of sympathy. She was probably Redford’s postgrad, and had almost certainly spent the last two hours trying to talk him down.

 

            “Professor Redford,” Becker continued, polite tone wearing thin, his grip on the back of Redford’s jacket white-knuckled, “allow me to present my colleagues, Miss Lewis, Dr Hart, Miss Maitland, Mr Temple and Captain Stringer.”

 

            “This is an outrage!” Professor Redford bellowed. “I require access to a lawyer, immediately! Miss Lewis, if you’re in charge of this ape, I _demand_ that you order him to return my mobile phone!”        

 

The postgrad put a despairing hand over her eyes. “Professor Redford,” she began.

 

“As for you, _Aethelflaed Morris_ –”

 

The postgrad flushed bright red to the roots of her floppy dishwasher-blonde hair, and Becker looked as if he would have preferred to punch the professor than keep him upright any longer. Stephen thought the woman was going to fold, but then a scratchily high-pitched yell of “ _Neil_!” rang through the little hall, and silence fell.

 

Professor Redford’s beetroot face took on a puce tinge, short greying beard quivering with indignation. “What?” he hissed.

 

“I’ve seen the footage of that _thing_ ,” the postgrad said, clearly on the verge of tears, “I’ve talked to the students, I know how lucky we are not to be dead right now. This is important. This is life or death. Could you _please_ stop screaming about things which don’t actually matter _right now_?”

 

There was a small pause, and Jenny Lewis stepped into the breach. “I’m sure this situation can be resolved with a word in private, professor, while my colleagues work on containing the external issues.” She smiled her glittering, death-to-all-about-her smile, and extended a perfectly manicured hand. “Jenny Lewis, Home Office.”

 

Professor Redford gave her a grumpy look that nonetheless managed to take in the fact that Jenny was a very good-looking woman with a superficially charming smile directed straight at him, and muttered something more polite before shaking hands. “My office is this way,” he said gruffly, and ushered Jenny towards the half-open door he’d burst out of. Stephen saw Captain Stringer flick a glance at Blade, who nodded slightly and followed Jenny.

 

              The hall was awkwardly quiet in the way large gatherings of people with urgent things to do are, full of a shifting and a shuffling and a tension that no-one wanted to break.

 

            “Breakfast room,” the postgrad said almost inaudibly, scrubbing her eyes with the heel of her hands. She was dressed in battered boots, unflattering jeans that showed the stains and wear of previous muddy work, and a grey long-sleeved t-shirt under a padded khaki gilet, and her round-framed glasses were now perched at a dangerous angle on top of her head. Stephen felt a stab of sympathy for a postgrad in an impossible position, and thanked his lucky stars that Nick, while short-tempered, usually calmed down and listened to reason after ten minutes of sustained shouting peppered with Scottish invective and libellous assertions. Aethelflaed Morris – and that couldn’t possibly be her real name, could it? – had clearly been getting it in the neck for the last two hours.

 

            Becker patted her awkwardly on the back, removed her glasses and cleaned them on an edge of his shirt before returning them to her. “We put the students in the games room,” he explained. “The breakfast room is empty.”

 

             “We’ll head in there while Jenny’s busy, then,” Stephen said, taking charge in Jenny’s absence.

 

            “It’s the door to your left,” the postgrad said, straightening her glasses on her face, and pushed through the door in question, which led to a room with a lot of tables covered in plastic tablecloths, a breakfast station, and a serving hatch for other meals. The postgrad – Stephen really had to start thinking of her by her name, although God alone knew how that vaguely Saxon mouthful was meant to be pronounced – made a beeline for the coffee machine and punched in the code for a stiff black coffee. “Anyone else want a coffee?” she asked without turning round. “We’re not short on mugs.”

 

            Stephen eyed the serried ranks of stained, chipped and cheerily emblazoned mugs, and conceded that no, there wouldn’t be a shortage any time soon. Obviously archaeologists got through as much caffeine as scientists. “I’m OK, thanks, Miss – Effel?-”

 

            “Morris,” the postgrad snapped before he could get half of his miserable attempt at her name out. “It’s just Morris. Everyone calls me Morris. I don’t answer to anything else.”

 

            “All right,” Stephen said, taken aback.

 

            Becker patted Morris on the shoulder. “Morris doesn’t do her first name,” he said coolly, obviously regaining his composure after almost displaying an emotion that wasn’t mild sarcastic amusement, and added to Morris: “Just drink up. Coffee will help.”

 

            Morris muttered something and wandered over to the window, where she perched on the sill, rested her cheek against the glass and looked forlorn. Stephen felt sorry for her, but he had other problems right now.

 

            “What the hell’s going on there?” Stringer murmured as Becker came over to them.

 

            “She idolises Redford, and he’s spent the past two hours screaming at her for being a traitor because she brought me in and I called you lot.” Becker ran a hand through his hair, which fell in immaculately distressed waves over his forehead. “She’ll be all right when she’s finished her coffee.”

 

            Abby’s eyebrows shot up.

 

            “Morris is tougher than she looks,” Becker said firmly, and then turned to Stringer. “Stringer, what do you want me to do? I’m off-duty, and haven’t got any kit or anything, but –”

 

            “We brought you a shotgun,” Stringer said, and grinned at Becker. “Thought you might need your teddy.”

 

            Becker pulled a face at him, but he was also grinning. “Oh, fuck off.”

             

            “First priorities,” Stephen said, interrupting the display of military camaraderie. “Where’s the anomaly site? And what happened to the creature?”

 

            “The anomaly site is just by the dig, which is maybe twenty minutes’ walk from here,” Becker said. “Morris and I just missed the creature – we were walking down from the hostel and it was charging in the opposite direction. We didn’t see it, don’t know where it went, I would have followed it but I was worried about the students, and, well… See for yourself.”

 

            He removed a collection of mobile phones from various pockets, sorted through them, and selected one, which he handed over. It was a neat black smartphone with no password lock and no indication of what Stephen was meant to be looking at.

 

            “First video,” Becker prompted, leaning back against the table with his arms folded.

 

            Stephen clicked the indicated file and Connor and Abby crowded round him, Stringer craning his neck to see. The footage was shaky, taken from below ground level by someone kneeling in one of the ditches, and clearly showed a huge creature, like a wolf but several times larger, a grey-tinged ochre colour with irregular dark stripes, loping along a road in front of some grey buildings. It was pursued by five or six brightly-dressed men on horseback, and splotched with darker patches that might have been blood, but it didn’t behave as if it were injured. Tinny noise came from the mobile phone’s speakers: screams from the other students, terrified crying from someone close to the phone, Professor Redford’s distinctive voice yelling and garbled but nonetheless discernible yells from the men on horseback. They were not in a language Stephen recognised.

 

            The video finished and froze. Stephen handed the phone back to Becker, heart plummeting. “Becker. If that got anywhere near people…”

 

            “I know,” Becker said, voice tight again. He met Stephen’s eyes, and Stephen knew he would be able to read what Stephen was thinking off his face – Stephen only ever managed to hide half of what he was feeling, although the rest was well screened behind the high emotion dealing with the anomalies entailed.

 

Fear for the innocent people who might already have encountered the creature. The sinking knowledge that this was a disaster great enough to expose the ARC even if Professor Redford didn’t manage to stick his oar in with the national press. Horror that this had been going on under their very noses without their knowing. Connor was clever, maybe even brilliant, but how would his technology ever be able to keep up with the anomalies? Could his plans to lock the anomalies work if he couldn’t do something as basic as find the fucking things in the first place? Connor’s prototypes regularly exploded and that didn’t stop them becoming invaluable assets once they were fine-tuned, but perhaps the trouble he was having persuading the anomaly locker to work was indicative of more than just teething troubles. Maybe it wasn’t possible at all.

 

“Andrewsarchus?” Connor said obliviously. He was replaying the video, fingers flicking across the screen to show the best shots clearly again and again.

 

            “Could be,” Stephen allowed. He had a lot of practice at getting a grip when everything was going to hell; he did it now. In Danny’s absence – hell, sometimes in Danny’s presence, when Danny was off ‘borrowing’ a small plane or something equally batshit – he was de facto leader. “Right. Someone go and check on Jenny. She should probably stay here.” He looked at Stringer. “We’re going to need to split up. People to track the creature, people to stay here and keep a lid on the students and the professor.”

 

            It felt weird to call Redford the professor, and for a moment he missed Nick, even knowing that the old bugger was sitting up in bed in a heavily-guarded hospital, sulking about the number of beautiful papers he had written up for lack of anything else to do and now wasn’t allowed to publish. By now, Nick would have engaged Redford in an argument and spent two or three happy hours wiping the floor with him, in which time Stephen could have mopped up any disasters happening in the general vicinity.

 

            Stringer nodded, and turned away to start directing the men. Stephen looked back at Becker. “Can you show us the site?”

 

            Becker nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by a voice from the window. Morris had apparently finished her coffee and got herself back on track.

 

            “I can,” she said. “Also: there were people chasing that thing. On horseback. They must have been people like the one Chloe bumped into, and they definitely won’t have been pre-Roman occupation, not wearing chainmail – and no resemblance to legionaries whatsoever, so I doubt Roman involvement.” She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know _anything_ about Dark Ages Britain, do you?”

 

            Stephen blinked in surprise and a certain amount of irritation. He really didn’t want to be dragging around a civilian postgrad with no anomaly experience on a shout like this, even one that had seemingly assimilated the idea of portals to the past without so much as a hiccup, particularly not when she was in a slightly tenuous emotional state. “Look, Miss Morris, we can manage a simple anomaly incursion without –”

 

            “That’s a no,” Morris said, and set her mug aside, straightening up and tilting her chin stubbornly. “And don’t even pretend, Beck - you will have forgotten _all_ your Latin by now, if it even _applies_ in the historical period, and as for your Welsh, which I suppose is your next best hope, it was never very good in the first place.”

 

            Stephen opened his mouth to speak, shut it again, took a deep breath, closed his mouth once more, and stared wordlessly at Becker, who began to look persecuted. Stringer paused in the middle of considering the state of Miss Lewis’s manoeuvres and Connor almost dropped the smartphone he was still examining.

 

            As usual, it took Abby to say what they were all thinking. She shook her head, blinked heavily-lined eyes, and then said: “Becker. Where the hell did _you_ learn to speak Welsh?”

 

            “Mediaeval Welsh,” Becker corrected.

 

            “Fine, mediaeval Welsh. Whatever. But _why_?”

           

            “I studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at university,” Becker said with dignity, and then ruined it by glowering at Morris. “Which is how I come to be friends with the most meddling woman I’ve ever met. _Isn’t it, Morris_?”

 

            Stephen pinched the bridge of his nose. Sometimes, the anomaly project made him feel bloody ancient. “Fine. Becker, pick up the shotgun Stringer brought you, Morris is your responsibility. Tell her the house rules as we go. And we’re going _now_ , do I make myself clear?”

 

            The room emptied satisfyingly quickly, and Stephen, who was seldom pleased with his ability to manage large groups of people, nearly smiled.

           


	4. Chapter 4

            Lorraine Wickes rarely admitted to being bored, but she was now. She’d been dragged into the office in the middle of a very enjoyable day spent with her boyfriend, including an ice-skating trip to Somerset House that had left them both laughing, cold, and thinking of interesting ways to warm up, and had expected to find more work than she could handle on her arrival. There was something about the combination of the words ‘students’, ‘press’, ‘monster’, ‘historic period’ and ‘Captain Becker may or may not have hit a civilian’ that led her to expect mayhem, if not outright disaster, and she had brought Blade with her for moral support. Instead, Blade had been hastily substituted for Chalky on the reserve roster and packed off to Cornwall, since Chalky was off spending quality time with his wife and sons and Blade was handy, and Lorraine had found herself twiddling her thumbs. Authorising the temporary hire of several large jeeps, monitoring the local and BBC news websites, and dispatching such of the team’s equipment as couldn’t be carried in a helicopter to Cornwall, as well as disentangling who was required where and putting the entire PR and Legal departments on standby was interesting while it lasted, but entirely routine. Lorraine did not find it a challenge. The same applied to negotiating the release of Danny Quinn from the tender loving care of Durham Constabulary. Lorraine was thinking of delegating the task of springing the team from the various jails they landed up in every few months when suspicious coppers refused to believe they were from the Home Office to someone on a permanent basis. In fact, she had a draft of a potential standard operating procedure to be dumped in the lap of her chosen victim all ready to go, and was currently mentally scripting an appendix detailing the different courses of action required when it was a Saturday in December and getting hold of anyone of any seniority in the police force in question was proving difficult.

 

Lorraine tapped her pen against the plastic of her keyboard and assumed a mildly displeased expression. She knew perfectly well that instead of virtuously occupying himself with some minor, unimportant and non-time critical task like signing off on the expenses forms she had left on his desk on Friday, her boss was playing Tetris.

 

            The phone rang. Lorraine checked the number on its screen, picked up the phone, and – as per standard procedure – waited. This was not a secure phone line, and it had been dialled by outsiders before; fortunately, they had begun to reel off their pizza order before Lorraine had got more than ‘Good afternoon’ out of her mouth, well before the words ‘James Lester’s office’ had been uttered, let alone ‘Anomaly Research Centre’.

 

            “Hi, I’m looking to sell a reindeer complete with harness,” Jenny said.

 

At least the code words were work-safe this month, if unnecessarily festive, Lorraine thought. “Purple or green?” she responded, and then added: “Hello, Jenny.”

 

“Hi, Lorraine. Can you put me through to James?”

 

“Of course,” Lorraine said, and pressed the transfer button. “Mr Lester.”

 

“Miss Wickes,” Lester said smoothly, occasional tapping in the background. Lorraine was almost fooled into thinking that he was solemnly managing his overflowing email inbox, but then he thumped the space bar, which rattled in its setting, a little too hard for ordinary typing.

 

 “Jenny to speak to you.”

 

The tapping stopped. “Put her through,” Lester said.

 

Lorraine hung up her phone, and got on with her work, wondering if someone would bother to speak to her at some point, or whether she would be forced to resort to calling Abby for an update.

 

 

Outside the youth hostel in Cornwall, Jenny stood on the spot that had been pointed out to her as the one and only place where phone signal was available and talked. Blade leaned against one of the few cars in the car park, sharp green eyes sliding over the surroundings, and three of the other men stood around with the safety catches off their rifles, watching out for a creature on the rampage. Lieutenant Owen had been trusted with her safety, and he evidently wasn’t taking any chances.

 

From the hostel, the students watched. Jenny had seen them drift to the windows when they noticed she was out here, and she could feel the weight of their stares in an itching spot between her shoulder-blades. Not that it bothered her much: if she couldn’t deal with gawkers, she wouldn’t have kept her job. The students were pretty cowed, and she still had their mobile phones. Or rather, Lieutenant Owen still had their phones, and he was twice the size of even the belligerent rugby player who had decided it was a good idea to take a swing at Captain Becker earlier and had been decked for his trouble.

 

“… so he will co-operate, temporarily, but we’ve got to look like we’re doing something – something effective,” she finished, and listened for Lester’s response.

 

“We’ll just have to hope that the Scooby Gang are up to that,” Lester answered. “Any news from them?”

 

“None,” Jenny sighed. “I’m working on the principle that no news is good news, and that if anything happens, Abby at least will remember to call me.”

 

“Hmm. There’s nothing on the news.”    

 

Jenny refrained from pointing out that that was largely thanks to her efforts, and that she was still in two minds about giving Professor Redford back his phone. When not bawling about his rights as a British citizen, the man was chatty and charming. But Jenny had gone off talkative professors at some point, and in any case, he lacked Nick’s common sense.

 

Jenny couldn’t believe she’d just seriously thought that sentence.

 

“Let’s hope it stays that way,” she remarked, dragging herself back to the present. “I’ll call when I have more information, James.”

 

“Please do,” Lester said dryly, and hung up.

 

Jenny sank her teeth into her lower lip, stared unseeingly out over the countryside for a few moments, and thought dark thoughts about her boss’s tendency to dramatics.

 

Then, shivering in the sharp cross-country wind that had got up while she was talking to Lester, she turned and went back inside.     

 

***

 

Five miles away, on the edge of a fallow field, Abby and Stephen were staring at a dead horse, an equally dead man-at-arms, and – some distance away, close to the centre of the field - a distinct shortage of anomaly. There were clear marks that suggested the creature’s passage through an anomaly, and the disappearance of the remaining men-at-arms through the same one; the confused tracks that cut off suddenly were proof enough. 

 

Stephen rubbed his chin and mouth with one hand, frowning. Abby had already watched him examine the few scuffed marks that the creature had left behind clearly, a small notch of concern between his eyebrows. “This doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”

 

Abby half turned and looked doubtfully at Morris, over by one of the hired jeeps, leaning back into Becker’s personal space as if unconscious of it. “Unless Morris can tell us something?”

 

“From the horse?”

 

“The soldier, moron,” Abby said, nudging him with her elbow. She could tell perfectly well what had happened to the horse, and so could Stephen. “The armour. Stuff like that.”

 

Stephen turned to look back at Morris likewise. “If we can get her to come over here.”

 

“We have to try,” Abby pointed out. She didn’t have to say that the anomaly team was experiencing an almost comical lack of immediate disaster to throw itself at. Connor was working himself into a tizzy over the fact that he couldn’t make his anomaly detector work properly – they had passed out of the black spot surrounding the dig for a few exhilarating moments, and then plunged straight into another one – and trying to draw conclusions about the departed anomaly based on the behaviour of a compass needle.

 

Stephen ran a hand through his hair, ensuring that it got even spikier and more ruffled than usual, and gave Abby a hopeful look. “This could be the last anomaly? It could be gone?”

 

“Oh yeah?” Abby said sceptically, and went over to Morris. The student had added a pair of fingerless gloves and a beaten-up Barbour to her earlier clothes, and looked totally disreputable next to Becker, who merely looked slightly inconvenienced by the stiff wind and the disaster that looked increasingly like being an anti-climax.

 

“There’s a person, isn’t there?” Morris said.

 

Abby nodded.  “Dead,” she elaborated cautiously, not knowing how Morris would react.

 

Morris swallowed, and bobbed her head. “You want me to take a look and see what I can work out?”

 

“That would be good,” Abby allowed. “If you, you know. Felt you could.”

 

Morris gave her a flat look, and jammed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose. “That’s why I _came_ , isn’t it?”

 

“Well. Yeah.” Abby coughed, and tried not to consider which of the wide spectrum of civilian attitudes to dead things she was likely to encounter very shortly. She didn’t like dealing with any of them. “There’s also a, um. Dead horse.”

 

Morris glanced at Becker, who mainly looked inscrutable, and then sighed deeply. “If I’m sick, I promise to aim at someone else.”

 

Abby led Morris over to the bodies, and Becker shadowed them, dark and quiet and dependable. Morris did turn green when she saw them, but kept control of herself, to Stephen’s obvious relief.

 

Morris stamped over to the man-at-arms, and after momentary hesitation crouched down beside the body and tilted her head to one side, eyes assessing.

 

“Huh,” she said after a moment. “ _Romanitas_.”

 

Becker looked as if this meant something to him, but as far as Abby could tell, nobody else did. She was certainly drawing a complete blank as she watched Morris’s fingers sketch lightly in the air, hovering over the helmet and the chainmail armour, and she couldn’t tell if Morris was thinking of the man as human, or as nothing more than archaeological remains.

 

Morris sat back on her heels. “Interesting. No, seriously. Um.” She looked a bit green again. “Sad, and disgusting. Not keen on dead bodies when they aren’t… y’know… skeletal. But.”

 

Fortunately, Becker told her to get to the point before anyone else did.

 

“Right.” Morris clapped her hands together. “First things first: this guy is probably Romano-British, or at least from a group that has taken on elements of that culture. The chainmail in itself isn’t a clear indication, Saxons used chainmail of a similar pattern, but I would argue that the fact that he’s a cavalryman and he’s using a saddle and a sword typical of Roman cavalry –” she nodded at the sword, which had fallen a little distance from the body – “makes him more likely to be Romano-British. Particularly given the cross around his neck and the amulet.”

 

Abby craned her neck. Helpfully, Morris retrieved a pencil from her pocket and carefully lifted the item in question with its point so Abby could see. “Amulet,” Abby repeated.

 

Morris nodded.

 

“Is that a dick on a string?” Stephen demanded.

 

Morris rolled her eyes. “It’s a phallic symbol on a metal chain, yeah. The Romans often used them as good-luck charms. The fact that the amulet itself is bronze and the chain is silver suggests to me that the charm didn’t originally belong to this individual, but is an antique. Saxons did that with Roman trinkets, using them as status items even if they weren’t very valuable to their original Roman owners. But why would a Saxon go for a typically Roman lucky charm?”

 

“Advertisement?” Becker suggested cheekily.

 

Morris gave him a deeply disapproving look, and went back to breaking down the information she’d got. “That would chime with the fact that this chainmail has been mended, probably more than once. This suggests the potential reuse of relatively old Roman objects to me.” She pointed to a couple of areas in it that looked a bit irregular. “The chainmail isn’t conclusive evidence for anything, as the Roman pattern was pretty widely used, but it’s in a Roman pattern. Roman amulet. Roman sword. Roman saddle. Roman religious symbol – the Romans were Christian by this point, despite the pagan lucky charm. If he wasn’t Roman, he identified with them. Maybe he had a Roman immigrant or two from the far ends of the empire or something in his family, that would explain why he isn’t white – there are well-off people of colour known from parts of Roman Britain, like the lady with ivory bangles from York, maybe you heard about that. Also, he was pretty well-off. He owned silver – see, the cross he’s wearing is silver too. He could afford armour, _good_ armour, a good horse, and good weapons. The chainmail isn’t new, but the helmet looks pretty new to me, and it’s pretty fancy for a commoner’s.” Morris hesitated. “I don’t know what you do with humans.”

 

“We don’t come across them a lot,” Stephen said. “But the same goes as for the creatures: try to return them to their own homes.”

 

Morris nodded. “This guy might have posh family or a patron who would appreciate him being returned in good order.” She looked temporarily appalled by the words coming out of her mouth, then carried on. “For time period, I would say… late 400s, perhaps. Mid 400s. Guessing, here, but this is a relatively well-off guy who could afford silver and still wore a bronze amulet with a silver chain and patched armour, which fits with the loss of expertise in a number of technological areas and the fact that old Roman things were valued after Rome withdrew the legions. There isn’t anything especially distinctive, from what I can see, unless he’s got coins on him.” She paused. “He probably doesn’t, and anyway, I’m not checking.”

 

“We don’t expect you to,” Abby said hastily. Morris had clearly formed a dreadful impression of them.

 

“Good.” Morris looked back down at the body. “Right. Now for the bit you’re not going to like.”

 

Abby frowned. “What?”

 

The man had fallen on his shield side, but had turned away from the landing; his arm was a mess but his shield was face-up. It was yellow, with a black boar on it. The same applied to the tunic over his chainmail. Almost apologetically, Morris indicated these. “I’m beginning to think Ne- Professor Redford might have a point. The current thinking on Arthur is that he wasn’t a king, but a Romano-British war leader who played an ultimately futile part in trying to kick the Saxons out. Here we have a Romano-British guy from the period after the legions left, when raiding Saxons were a problem. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was a big deal even if he did make stuff up, describes Arthur as the boar from Cornwall.” Morris coughed. “That’s a boar. We’re in Cornwall.”

 

There was a brief silence. “So you’re telling me…” Stephen began, and then stopped.

 

“I’m not telling you anything,” Morris said cautiously, “except that if you had told me when I woke up this morning that I would have a dead member of Arthur Pendragon’s warband on my hands I would have called the police on you, and now I might just say you were a bit of a fruitloop.” She straightened up and dusted her hands on her jeans, tucking the pencil away. “It’s all just possibilities.”

 

“And there’s no chance,” Stephen said, voice slightly incredulous, “that that actually is… King Arthur.” He looked as if he were struggling to assimilate the idea of Arthurian legends alive, well, and wandering through anomalies, and his eyebrows had taken up seemingly permanent residence halfway up his forehead.

 

Abby couldn’t blame him: she was getting a bit of a headache herself.

 

Morris gave him an old-fashioned look. “No idea. Sorry. I would be surprised, though, given that nobody stopped for him.” She nodded over their shoulders at the lack-of-anomaly site and the tracks that led straight into it, and they all turned round just in time to see Connor slap his own face in frustration, glower at the readings he’d scribbled down and restart his calculations.

 

Out of common courtesy and embarrassment, they all turned back, then realised that they had turned back to keep staring at a couple of dead bodies and moved aside, Morris almost tripping over the deadly combination of ditch and barbed wire fence at the side of the lane that the horse and rider had fallen prey to. Abby made a mental note to sit with Connor later; he would be kicking himself about his own inability to break the laws of physics just to get the job done, and probably not particularly receptive to comforting platitudes Abby didn’t like to dole out, but he liked it when she stayed close and did her own work while he fumed at himself and looked depressed and burnt his fingers trying to solder things into place or combed through never-ending code.

 

Morris shuffled her feet. “Does that help?”

 

“More information always helps,” Abby said, before Stephen could disagree.

 

Stephen nodded. “Thanks. Abby, do you think Connor’s safe to interrupt?”

 

“Probably,” Abby said, fishing her phone from her pocket. It had exactly one dodgy bar of signal, but that was probably the best she was going to get around here. She started flicking through her contacts book until she got to Jenny, who would want to know about the disappearing anomaly and creature and the bodies left on their hands, not to mention the Arthurian connection. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Lester found out about that last bit. Lorraine Wickes was pretty incorruptible, but she liked Abby, so maybe if Abby asked nicely enough and Lorraine’s professional ethics could stand the pressure, the older woman might unbend far enough to give her the gossip.

 

“We should try to get a handle on what this thing is,” Stephen said. “We’ve got footage. We’ve got some tracks. We’ve worked off less before. It should be doable. And then let’s get back to the hostel and reassess the situation.”

 

Abby made an agreeing noise, and finally got a call through to Jenny, who picked up on the first ring. “Hi, Jenny. Don’t worry, no-one’s hurt. You’re not going to believe this…”  

 

***

 

Back in London, Ryan heard his phone buzz on the side table and picked it up, grabbing the remote to pause the film playing on the TV as he did so. He knew from experience that it was no good waiting anxiously for Stephen to get back, but the film was doing a very poor job of distracting him from Stephen’s absence, he’d already spent two hours in the gym, and he didn’t want to go to the ARC to be given busy work to occupy him, so he went for the phone pretty quickly. The message had hardly loaded by the time he read it, and he had to read it several times before it sank in.

 

_Creature being chased around Cornwall by King Arthur’s men._

 

 _U’r fucking kidding me_ , Ryan texted back.

 

 _N_ , Stephen returned, master of brevity as usual.

 

 _This job is ridiculous_.

 

_Y. Might be home soon. Anomaly gone, creature vanished through anomaly, so did men._

 

Ryan felt suddenly more cheerful, and the ARC shot back up in his estimation. _So shift your arse + get back._

 

The answer came after a five-minute pause, as if Stephen was drafting and re-phrasing his return text, trying not to give away too much of how he felt but still make it clear to Ryan. _Will try. Miss having u out here. Stringer + Becker not as good._

 

Ryan smiled. _Love u too_ , he texted back. _Don’t do anything stupid._

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

“And that’s the end of that,” Connor said, slinging his portable anomaly detector into the back of one of the hired jeeps with a certain amount of violence.

 

Stephen said nothing, just clapped him on the shoulder, but Morris butted in.

 

“What’s the end of what?”

 

“The anomaly is closed,” Stephen answered so Connor didn’t have to. “The creature went through it and didn’t come back out again. Unless we get compelling evidence that it’s reopened, we’ll be leaving soon.”

 

“Never mind that all our kit’s followed us to Cornwall and everyone back at the ARC is twitching on standby,” Connor said gloomily, staring at the ARC’s own jeeps, which were negotiating for space in the car park, which was rather fuller than it had been a few hours ago.

 

“The ark?” Morris said, obviously completely confused, “what, like Noah?”

 

“Morris,” Becker said quite gently, “stop asking questions,” and drew her away.

 

“Do you have to go?” Morris was asking, and then: “Why are you going? This isn’t the first time this has happened. What if it comes back…?”

 

Connor and Stephen looked at each other, and Connor sat down on the back seat of the jeep he’d just flung his stuff into. “I don’t know, Stephen. With no signal, this piece of shit –“ he thumped his one-of-a-kind, totally original, _useless_ anomaly detector, chocolate brown eyes furious – “is no good.”

 

“Even if these things are recurring,” Stephen said, picking up on his train of thought, “Jenny will have talked to the students, she’ll know if that’s true or not by now…” He slumped against the side of the car and cast his eyes heavenwards, the tranquiliser rifle tucked into its case and slung across his back shifting against cloth and skin and muscle and bone, as familiar as his own name.

 

“Do we stay here?” Connor said, almost rhetorically.

 

“If they’re recurring,” Stephen said, sending up a metaphorical prayer that that was not the case. “God, we’ll have to.” He let his head thump against the car’s metal. “Professor Redford will lose his rag, Jenny will have to spend hours doing damage control, the shit will probably hit the fan anyway, Lester will be sarcastic –”

 

“You won’t be able to go home to Ryan,” Connor added.

 

Stephen stopped, and then heaved a sigh. “No.”

 

“And Blade won’t get to go back to Miss Wickes, which is going to piss him off. And probably her. And Lyle won’t get to go back to Lester. Except – ew, I don’t really want to think about that, do you? At least Blade and Miss Wickes are _hot_.”

 

Stephen’s train of thought promptly flipped off the tracks, and he snapped out of the bad mood he was spiralling into. He blinked. “Conn?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Has anyone ever told you you say the _weirdest_ things?”

 

“Oh God, yeah,” Connor said easily. “Abby, mainly. All the time. Why?” He gave Stephen a look of studied innocence.

 

Stephen returned a narrow look. “Let’s go in. We need to talk to Jenny. Where’s Abby?”

 

“Dunno,” Connor said. “Indoors, probably. Not a fan of the cold. Hey, Stephen. Which are you more scared of, Blade or Miss Wickes?”

 

“Miss Wickes,” Stephen said without hesitation. “Blade would make it quick. Come on, Conn. Get indoors.”  

 

 

            Ten minutes later, Stephen was leaning against a bookcase in the professor’s makeshift office, which looked worse than Nick’s in grant application season, probably because none of the papers had fossilised yet. Professor Redford sat in his desk chair; Jenny sat in the comfy other chair. Captain Stringer was standing just behind her, and Connor had dragged in a stool. Abby stood by Connor. Most of them had cups of tea, or coffee; the professor was in a jovial mood.

 

            Becker’s friend Morris was hovering, caught between one side and the other. Stephen knew himself to be a cloth-head when it came to emotions and stuff, but he couldn’t help but notice that Morris’s eyes rested automatically on Redford, and that he didn’t look at her once, even when she brought him tea. He was relaxed and smiling, coarse red hair in neat order, comfortable in his green jumper, obnoxious checked shirt, and muddy cords. She was strung tighter than a snapping wire.

 

            Not a good sign. 

 

“There is a chance the creature will come back,” Stephen said carefully. “A small chance. To the best of our knowledge it’s gone, but we don’t want to take chances.”

 

“Not with lives, no,” Professor Redford agreed, still smiling. Whatever Lester was paying Jenny, it wasn’t enough. “When can I get back to excavating?”

 

“Could be as early as tomorrow,” Stephen said, forcing himself to be upbeat about the fact that he would therefore also be hanging around till tomorrow. “Is there space in the hostel for a team to remain here, and if so, can you introduce us to the people who run it?”

 

“Of course, of course,” Professor Redford said, and got up.

 

Morris had been frowning. Now she froze, and shot out of the door like a bat out of hell. That drew Redford’s attention to her, but he just frowned, and asked the empty air what had got into the stupid woman now. Stephen refrained from trying to compose an answer to that one, and went out of the room too, following Becker.

 

The postgrad had come to a halt in the doorway to the so-called games room, which contained some ragged beanbags, a shelf of much-abused books, a pool table and not as many students as it should have done. “Where are the others?” she was demanding, evidently having assessed this last fact. “Where did they go?”

 

“They went to the pub, Morris,” one of the boys, a kid with an old burn scar on his lively face, said.

 

Morris’s face drained of colour. “Who told them it was safe?” she gasped, to guilty silence from the students. “I told you to stay inside! _I told you to stay safe inside_!”

 

Outside, someone screamed.

 

 

Pandemonium in the guise of well-oiled routine reigned. Morris bolted for the front door; Becker grabbed her and forcibly held her back as half of the soldiers who weren’t on guard outside the front door – and Stephen knew Stringer would be having Words with them over that, since they’d apparently just let the students wander off – headed for the screaming, and half took up defensive positions around the front of the house.  Stephen glanced back at Abby, caught her eye, and went outside as well. He had kept his tranquiliser rifle with him, on the grounds that he didn’t trust some of the students not to go after it, and he now took it out of its case and loaded it. Abby stuffed a radio headset into his hands as he went outside, slipping her own onto her head, and then dragged Connor upstairs. Stephen guessed that she was looking for an upstairs window, a secure vantage point.

 

The screaming was coming from down the lane: it had only carried so far because the wind had dropped, the cries shattering the eerie stillness of a completely moonless night. The hostel had no outside lights, and even with the jeeps’ headlights on, the hedges on either side of the lane cast deep shadows into their glaring light.

 

Stephen glanced back for a split second, and saw his team silhouetted in the windows. Abby and Connor at their upstairs window, watching, waiting. Jenny at a downstairs window, calling Professor Redford away from it, but he wouldn’t go. Then he looked back, and joined Stringer and the advance party heading into the night, towards the screams.

 

His headset crackled. “Alpha One Alpha Two, over.”

 

“Alpha Two Alpha One, talk away, over,” Stephen answered in a clear, quiet voice, going through the familiar motions of a signal check. The line wasn’t great, but it wasn’t dreadful either. Which meant that the anomaly was probably not close by.

 

The screaming was coming towards them faster than they were moving towards it. Stephen took the safety catch off his rifle, and said to Stringer: “We can’t afford to let this one get away alive. But if there are more humans – leave them alone unless you absolutely have to.”

 

Stringer nodded, and gave the orders just as the screamer finally came into view, a small, slight and very fast young man who promptly tripped and fell flat on his face at Adey’s feet. Adey grabbed him and heaved him up off the floor, more kindly than he might otherwise have done, and the screams faded to a terrified whimpering and hysterically fast breathing.

 

“Where is it?” Stephen snapped. “Where’s the creature? What did you see?”

 

“It’s got Rob, it’s got Rob,” the kid babbled, and Stringer and Stephen looked at each other. Stephen couldn’t hear any more screams. He couldn’t hear anything more at all.

 

“And Tash, Tash, she fell – she –”

 

“Jenkins, Adey. Take him up to the hostel,” Stringer snapped, eventually reaching the end of his patience, and added: “If you see anything else, shoot it.”

 

Stephen did not disagree. Nor did he watch as Jenkins and Adey took one of the kid’s arms each and propelled him up the road, up towards the lights and the uncertain safety of the hostel. He kept walking with Stringer, covering the ground quickly, his blue eyes wide in the darkness, sweeping the night to pick up shadow and shade, looking for movement that should have been there but wasn’t. Nothing moved, nothing made noise, except them.

 

The road twisted, and there they found the creature, a darker patch of darkness hunched over a small figure that twitched and moaned as the creature ripped at it. Their lights made it startle, and for one frozen moment they looked into the eyes of a nightmare, huge and witch-yellow and reflective, lips drawn back from huge dirty ivory teeth as bloodstained as its muzzle, a sandy dark-striped wolf taller than a man, its low, rumbling growl  a bassline that chilled Stephen’s spine.

 

He’d dealt with animals that killed humans before. Man-eaters, hunters, predators. He’d never seen anything as implacable, or as murderous, as this, and he was genuinely shaken.

 

The boy at its feet lay far too still, and the rumbling growl rose to a high yelping howl, and Stringer gave the order to fire, and bright flashes and the sharp clatter of automatic fire filled the air. Stephen called it in on the radio, shouting above the guns’ firing, but didn’t know and didn’t really care if Abby heard him, tensely watching the creature.

 

It reeled back at the first shots – retreated, a step, another step, still growling, and then finally turned tail and fled. Stephen spoke quickly to Stringer and got on the radio again, setting a team of two men and Abby in one of the ARC’s jeeps to follow the creature, and when he looked back down at the road silvered charcoal in starlight and nothing else, Ditzy was kneeling by the boy on the ground, and he was shaking his head.

 

They just about got his body off the road before the group in the jeep roared past, Abby’s hair a bright white smudge, her eyes pale and steady catching his as they passed by, and Stephen just felt empty.

 

***

 

 When they brought the boy’s body back to the house, Jenny couldn’t keep Professor Redford from seeing. Oh, all he saw was the body bag, black and implacable in the lights of the remaining jeeps after Abby had taken one group out to track the creature and Connor had taken another in search of the anomaly, but that was enough, and he went up in a sheet of flame, screaming at her and threatening her until Blade actually had to do something about it, which was not – in Jenny’s extensive experience of Blade sitting in on her meetings with potentially truculent members of the public – generally necessary. Sitting back in his chair with Blade’s iron hands on his shoulders as a reminder that good behaviour and better manners ought to be preserved, Professor Redford was no more conciliatory. If he cared about Robert Aske, Natasha George and Josh Marriott, and Jenny was forced to concede that he probably did, he showed it through anger.

 

“You said it was safe!” he said, rage boiling in his voice.

 

“I did no such thing!” Jenny snapped. “We said there was still a risk, we said we would wait to be sure, because we thought the incident had resolved itself but could not be _sure_. If you chose to believe that there was no further danger, Professor Redford, then that is not to be laid at our door. We _should_ have been better able to protect the students. Yes, we _should_. But they were _also_ informed that risk remained, and if they successfully sneaked past the people who were meant to protect them, I think we can be forgiven for having hoped that they had the sense to listen to us when we warned them. We are doing our best to protect you. Don’t make it any harder than it already is!” 

 

“I’m going to the press. To the police. To my MP. To the _Prime Minister_ , if necessary. This is criminal negligence from a state obsessed by so-called security, this is _your fault_ –”

 

Jenny lost her temper, and found to her surprise that she could not lose herself in a satisfying rant, but that she was very, very tired. “Professor Redford. What makes you think, if this is ‘a state obsessed by so-called security’, that anyone will listen to a word you say?”

 

“We still have a free press –”

 

Jenny picked up his phone, left carelessly on the desk, and tossed it into his lap. Even before they had heard the screaming, even before Josh had been towed into the hostel weeping, ushered to his own room and sedated by Owen as the best thing for him, when they had thought that the creature and its unfortunately historical attendants might have gone, Jenny had spent weary hours repeating to him, over and over again, that it wasn’t yet safe to go back to the disrupted dig. She wondered if anyone had ever said ‘no’ to him in his life. She thought of Aethelflaed Morris, so obviously nursing a broken enchantment, and wondered if anyone had ever been able to.

 

“Here you go,” she said to Professor Redford. “Try it. See how far you get. Because you know what, Professor Redford? I have had enough of you. I have bigger problems. Your students are grieving. One of them is dead. Another is traumatised. And one of them is still out there, on her own, and there’s quite a strong chance that she’s dead too. Call your friends. I hope they make a better listening ear than I do.”

 

She turned and marched out. After a short pause, although a little longer than she would have liked, Blade also left the room, closing the door softly but definitely behind him.

 

Jenny didn’t look at him, her fingers scrolling through her contacts book, looking for the right person to call in on the search for Natasha George, Josh’s friend Tash. “What do I keep telling you about ruining my hard work, Corporal Richards?”

 

“You keep telling me not to do it, ma’am,” Blade said.

 

“So why,” Jenny said, putting the call through and waiting on hold, “do you persist?”

 

“I didn’t say anything to him,” Blade said, and his green eyes glittered malevolently.

 

Jenny removed the phone from her ear temporarily. “ _Richards_.”

 

“I didn’t have to do anything,” Blade said, and sounded darkly pleased.

 

Jenny glowered at him. “Whatever you did, it’s _not_ going to make less work for Lorraine,” she warned him, and the slide of his expression into impassivity told her that her guess had been right. She put the phone back to her ear. “Rosalie. So good to hear from you. Sorry to call you at such an hour. I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

 

***

 

Becker sat on the hostel’s front step, shotgun cradled on his lap, and stared into the clashing lights of the cars in the car park. Stringer had told him to stay behind, keep an eye on Morris and the Professor, keep the students from doing anything stupid. He didn’t have half the kit he needed.

 

The student who’d died, Rob Aske, had had a black eye. He had been the overconfident rugby player who had thought he could take on Becker and win, and Becker had decked him. It felt like a lifetime ago.

 

He heard the soft tap of familiar footsteps behind him, and twisted. “Morris.”

 

Morris nudged him with the end of her boot, and he shifted up. She sat down in the space revealed, and buried her face in her hands. Becker took one hand off his gun long enough to lay it on her back, wordless and soothing. He’d done the same after Finals, when Morris was convinced she’d ended her career as an archaeologist. She’d walked away with a First to his 2:1, and all he’d had to say on the subject was ‘I told you so.’

 

This wasn’t so easily fixable.

 

“Now that’s an event,” Morris said, in a rather muffled voice.

 

“What?”

 

She nodded at the gun in his lap. “You taking your hands off that for anything. You’ve been cuddling it like a teddy, Beck.”

 

There was a soft sound that could in no way be described as a snort from one of the men on guard. Becker rolled his eyes. “That’s enough from the cheap seats, thank you, Fizz. Yes, it makes me feel better to be armed right now.”

 

Morris leant against him with a sigh. “Just so long as you don’t bring it to Christmas dinner. Reproduction mediaeval weaponry, Mum will tolerate. If you bring firearms you’ll have to peel all the potatoes.”

 

“I always have to peel all the potatoes anyway. Because you and your brother are a pair of lazy sods.” Becker elbowed her. “All right?”

 

“Ask a stupid question…”

 

Becker conceded that one. “Did the students have anything to say for themselves?”

 

Morris nodded. “I knew how they must have done it as soon as I knew some of them were missing. There’s a path back across the fields to the village, and a fire escape door which should be alarmed but isn’t.” Her head went back into her hands. “I just didn’t think they were stupid enough…”

 

“Rule of thumb,” Becker said kindly. “Civilians are always stupid enough. What else?”

 

 “It was Josh’s idea, to impress Tash,” Morris said dully. “And Rob went along with it to impress Josh and make Tash look stupid, because she wasn’t keen. But Tash hates Rob, so she got up on her high horse and went.”

 

Becker let out a low groan of frustration. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

 

“It’s a very subdued group,” Morris said, and put a plastic bag down at her feet. It clinked. “So subdued they hardly even complained when I took their phones off them again. That’s one less problem. They can’t put the stuff they took on YouTube now.” She gazed straight ahead of her, into the darkness. “They’re scared now. So they should be. They’ll do whatever you want them to.”

 

“Morris,” Becker said. “What did you tell them?”

 

“I gave them a piece of my mind,” Morris admitted. “A small one. I did tell them to stay inside and stay safe, and I’m responsible for them, Beck, so is N- Professor Redford. I didn’t tell them strongly enough, and…” She met his eyes. “I’m going to need a new job.”

 

“You’re going to need a new supervisor,” Becker corrected. “The one you’ve got is useless. It’s not your fault the students wouldn’t listen.”

 

There was a long silence.

 

“Christ,” Morris said eventually. “You do this every day?”

 

“Not every day,” Becker said. “Just most days.”

 

She put her arms around him, and hugged him around the shotgun.


	6. Chapter 6

 

Lorraine had run out of work to do. She was playing chess against the computer and contemplating the possibility of going home, even knowing that Blade wouldn’t be back for at least another three hours, when the phone rang and she started in her seat. She grabbed it.

 

“Lorraine,” Abby said quickly, before Lorraine could start in on the codeword system. “The anomaly hasn’t gone. Or there’s a new anomaly, or something. The creature’s back. It’s killed one student, one’s in shock, another one’s missing.”

 

Lorraine’s hands didn’t even shake, one steady on the phone, the other taking clear notes on the notepad she kept under her hand. “Is there a search out for the missing student?”

 

“Yes, and I’m following the creature and Connor’s gone to find the anomaly, and Jenny and Stephen are back at the hostel keeping things – keeping things going.”

 

There was a loud rattling noise on the end of the line. “Abby?” Lorraine said.

 

“Yes, no, we’re fine. That’s what happens when Kermit takes a level crossing at sixty miles an hour. Slow down, slow down, it’s slowing –”

 

“What do you need me to do?” Lorraine said patiently.

 

“Um, tell Lester, and, just – I wanted to update you. We might need to stay here a while, we’re going to need somewhere to crash, there might be space in the hostel – Jenny was working on that…”

 

“What’s the hostel called?” Lorraine said.

 

Abby made an uncertain noise, then gave a name rather tentatively. “It’s near St Mabyn, in Cornwall. I can’t remember what the little village just by it’s called.”

 

Lorraine made a note. “Is that all you need?”

 

“Yeah.” The background noise quieted, and Abby’s voice went lower as well. “Kermit, dip the headlights.”

 

“Can you see it?” Lorraine asked.

 

“Yeah,” Abby said distantly. “We’re following it. It heads across the fields mainly, avoids towns, thank God. It hasn’t gone that far… it moves slowly. We have a definite ID on it now. Andrewsarchus. Looks like a male? Big animal. _Very_ big. Seven foot at the shoulder. Give it space…”

 

“Abby, is there anything else I can do?”

 

“Uh, no, don’t think so. Oh. Warn Lester – getting this one back could be difficult. We think it came through a historical anomaly, and a prehistoric one before that.”

 

Lorraine silently boggled at the potential logistics issues Abby’s casual words implied. “I’ll do that, Abby. Good luck.”

 

“Yeah. You too,” Abby answered, and rang off.

 

Lorraine wondered why Abby had chosen to wish her luck, and then remembered, with a sinking feeling, that Professor Neil Redford had a certain amount of pull in the media. Like Professor Cutter, he was handsome, interesting, a magnetic personality and a good teacher – but even dinosaurs couldn’t outsell King Arthur, and it was no particular surprise that _The Archaeology of Arthur_ had been an unlikely roaring success. Lorraine had watched an episode or two with her boyfriend, in the sense that they had both sat down in the living room and turned on the TV, and then her boyfriend had assimilated the fact that there was nothing but some boring semi-historical bullshit on TV and had promptly rested his head in her lap and gone to sleep. It might not have been good history, let alone good archaeology, but it made for very good TV, and the accompanying book was a good read. Neil Redford would have great name recognition and even better contacts.

 

Lorraine thought some bad things and pulled out her phone to text Jenny. _Is Redford on-side?_

 

Not expecting an immediate reply, she slipped her phone back into her trouser pocket, got up, and went and knocked on her boss’s door.

 

“Come in, Miss Wickes,” Lester said smoothly, looking up from his computer screen. Tetris again, then. Lorraine reminded herself to get Connor to find out what his current highest score was and congratulate him on it.

 

“I’ve just spoken to Abby,” Lorraine said. “I don’t know what Stephen and Jenny have managed to pass on to you yet, I understand Professor Redford is a potential problem and they may still be dealing with him, but Abby says they have a definite identification of the creature, and that she’s trailing the creature while Connor is out looking for the anomaly.”

 

Lester’s eyebrows went up. “Not on their own, I hope.”

 

“I very much doubt Stephen would let that happen, and I heard Abby talking to the driver of the car she was in.” Lorraine eyed Lester carefully. “Abby said that three students were attacked by the creature: one is dead, one is traumatised, and another is still missing.”

 

Lester’s lips tightened. “I have heard from Jenny. She said three of the students had managed to escape Captain Stringer’s constant vigilance – to go to the _pub_ , of all places.” 

 

Lorraine said nothing. She _had_ set foot in a pub during her degree. Twice, even. Maybe three times.

 

Her phone buzzed in her pocket; she checked it when she was back in her office.

 

_No. He pushed me further than I could take and I all but dared him to go to the press. Sorry._

 

Lorraine felt a headache coming on.

 

***

 

“Left here, left, left, left I said, oh, no, _STOP_ –” Connor yelped, clinging to the handle above his seat and eyeing his wildly-spinning compass. “Oh, my God, why do we do this shit, I don’t even –”

 

Ross Jenkins brought the car to a stop. “It’s around here?”

 

“It’s got to be. Jesus Christ. Look at that.” He showed Ross the compass. The anomaly detector had shown some signal a couple of hills ago, and there had even been an exciting hint of a potential anomaly, but nothing concrete, and Connor was forced to rely on his compass, of all things. He’d forgotten how difficult that was, how much of a relief it had been, making a working ADD.

 

Ross’s eyebrows went up. The little needle was spinning round and round violently. “So it’s got to be around here somewhere, right?”

 

Connor looked around him. They were at the gates of someone’s farm – had narrowly avoided going straight through them, thanks to an exciting blind corner – and he could hear dogs barking, probably at them rather than the anomaly. “Yeah.” He sighed and let his head thump back against the seat. “It’s no good, we’re going to have to go on foot.”

 

“Boss’ll flip,” Ross pointed out.

 

“Not if you tell him it was my fault,” Connor said.

 

Rees, sitting in the back with his medical kit, leant forward. “Temple, we’re here to _stop_ you doing stupid shit.”

 

“This isn’t stupid, just –” Connor sighed again, and brandished his compass. “Look, we know it’s around here somewhere, yeah? We’ve been rocketing around this one field, don’t think I can’t tell we’re going in circles, and there’s no way in for a jeep.”

 

 Jenkins looked back at Rees, obviously waiting for orders. Connor crossed his fingers subtly. Rees was less uptight about taking risks than Jenny could be, but he was still pretty cautious as the soldiers went and Connor knew he was asking a lot.

 

“This is a terrible idea,” Rees said at last, and Connor slumped in his seat.

 

“Rees. Matt –”

 

“Don’t go trying to convince me, Temple, you didn’t see that thing.”

 

“The Andrewsarchus is nowhere near here. Abby and Kermit and Finn are following it around, we know exactly where it is.”

 

“Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking just the one creature has come through,” Rees said firmly, and then his attention was suddenly diverted.

 

Connor twisted and froze in his seat. Not only were the dogs they’d heard barking now leaping up at the steel bars of the gate, big black and brown things with lots of teeth and reflective green eyes, but they were also accompanied by their owner and his shotgun, who promptly let himself out of the gate and came over to the jeep, dogs jumping around him. Jenkins wound down Connor’s window and stared straight ahead of him, wooden public face firmly in place.

 

“Evening,” the farmer said uncommunicatively.

  
            “Um, evening,” Connor said, fully conscious that he was the worst of the anomaly team at dealing with the public. Stephen was less helpful, but the prettiness tended to cancel out any minor errors he made, whereas Connor bumbled and muttered and fell over himself the moment he tried to lie. “We’re, er, just looking for something, we were just going…”

 

“What sort of something,” the farmer said, still all on the same note and without allowing so much as a flicker of expression to cross a craggy face.

 

Connor threw caution to the winds. “Have you noticed anything odd on your land in the past few days? Wild animals… unusual phenomena?...”

 

“Depends on who’s asking.”

 

Connor swallowed hard. “We’re from the Home Office. Well, I consult, sort of, but – we study and control similar, um, phenomena, and… we know there’s one around here somewhere. But we obviously don’t want to come onto your land without, er, your… permission.” He could hear his voice trailing off, and thought that he wouldn’t even have convinced himself, let alone anyone else.

 

There was a long, awkward pause.

 

“I know what you’re talking about,” the farmer conceded, and turned away. “Started seeing it a week or two ago. Turns up every hundred years, thereabouts. At least, according to granddad, but he was a bit cracked. Never stopped going on about the Arthur stories.”

 

Connor was suddenly, wildly hopeful. “Can you show us?”

 

The farmer looked back, and stared hard at him. “Reckon I could.”

 

Connor glanced back at Rees and Jenkins; Rees looked resigned, then heaved his medical bag and other bits of kit over his shoulder and climbed out. Connor and Jenkins followed him, although Connor kept a wary eye on the dogs.

 

“They’re friendly,” the farmer said, half a smile tucked a little contemptuously into the corner of his mouth, and then Ross grinned and held his palm out flat to the dogs and made a soft noise between his lips, and they came straight to him and made friends, sniffing and licking at his hand.

 

The farmer actually smiled. “You know dogs?”

 

“My best friend’s a vet, sir,” Ross said, smiling back, and Connor watched in indignation as the famed Effortless Jenkins Charm came into play for the hundredth bloody time. “And I grew up with dogs like these.”

 

“It shows.” The farmer shut the gate behind them. “Name’s Tate. You?”

 

“I’m Connor Temple,” Connor said. “This is Lieutenant Rees, and Private Jenkins, who – apparently knows a lot more about large dogs than he was letting on.”

 

Ross, prevented from backchat by the presence of a civilian, just let his eyes sparkle cheekily. Rees trod firmly on Jenkins’ foot, and nodded at Tate. “We appreciate your cooperation, sir.”

 

Tate made a subterranean noise of scepticism. Connor decided not to challenge it.

 

Tate led them across the giant’s playground of a farm, past the house – Connor glimpsed a kid in one of the upper windows, a young teenage boy, so waved – over concrete floors and past large corrugated iron buildings, past machines that to Connor’s eye just looked large and potentially deadly. They reached another large metal gate, kept in place by a loop of blue nylon twine, and Tate let them through this.

 

“It’s down here,” he said, leading them across the field, into a deep fold in the land with a thin stream running through it. Connor saw a dim, pale glow, and felt his heart race with a mixture of relief and adrenaline. “You can’t see it from the road.”

 

“That explains why we couldn’t find it,” Connor said rather weakly, as they slid down the slope into the fold, and came face to face with the whirling shards of glass-like light that spoke so loudly of danger, adventure, excitement and secrets.

 

The anomaly was bloody _massive_ , despite being entirely hidden by the fold in the ground, and Connor was amazed the glow couldn’t be seen for miles around. No wonder the Andrewsarchus had made it through. The ground around it was heavily churned up and muddy, partly because the anomaly had hovered over the brook and the soft ground by its banks.

 

“Have you seen anything come out of it?” Connor asked.

 

Tate looked at him. “My son saw it. Bloody great animal, like a giant wolf?”

 

“Sounds about right.”

 

Tate nodded. “It’s been giving him nightmares.”

 

“Tell him we’ll get shot of it,” Rees said, marshmallow heart evidently at its softest. “He doesn’t need to worry.”

 

“Yeah,” Connor said, and gave Rees a hopeful look. “Rees…”

 

“The answer is no, Temple,” Rees said, marshmallow heart hardening in half a second flat.

 

“Come on, we need to know what – wait. Mr Tate, have you been through there?”

 

Tate gave him a very old-fashioned look. “I’m not stupid, lad. If giant wolves are coming out of it, I’m not going into it, and Adam’s not an imaginative boy. If he says giant wolves are coming out of it, well… giant wolves are probably coming out of it. Unless he’s trying to make a fool out of his old dad.”

 

 Connor grinned. “You know, nobody ever shows that much common sense. Nobody, ever.”

 

Tate sniffed, and Connor returned to his assault on Rees’ cautious sensibilities.

 

“Come on, Matt. We need to know what’s going on on the other side, it _matters_. What if -” Connor glanced at Tate, who returned a flat, unimpressed look. “You know what I mean.”

 

Rees took a deep breath. He undoubtedly did know what Connor meant: they needed to establish where this anomaly led to, and whether there might be more than one open to their own time period. There evidently had been more than one at some point – the closed anomaly in an entirely different place made that clear – but it didn’t follow that there was more than one open right now. “Are you insisting, Temple?”

 

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Connor said, uncertain whether this was going to leave him reeling from a Ryan Special for use on recalcitrant scientists, or walking proudly through the anomaly.

 

Rees glared. “Two minutes. No more.”

 

Connor fist-pumped, turned, and picked his way through the mud into the anomaly. He was very grateful Abby had bought him a pair of decent walking boots for his birthday, but knowing his luck he would slip and end up covered in mud anyway. He couldn’t help hesitating just before the shining shards, but the excitement he always felt when he saw an anomaly pushed him on, and the knowledge that Rees and Jenkins were right behind him and armed to the teeth was very comforting, like a metaphorical teddy bear.

 

It opened into a bramble, which was the clearest indication Connor had had so far both that this was not the Eocene – Andrewsarchus’ stomping grounds – and that Arthurian legends were grossly exaggerated. No parfait gentil knight worth his spurs would have got tangled in a bramble, and yet the little tags of fabric stuck on the thorns showed quite clearly that the people came through here had had a fine time making it into the anomaly. There was snow on the ground, and it was a lovely, muted evening, soft and dove-grey with falling snow.  Connor shuddered. Jenkins got stuck in the bramble and swore.

 

There was a soft jingling, and through the encircling branches of what was, after all, a fairly comprehensive bramble, Connor glimpsed something breathtaking. Rees saw it at the same time, and stiffened.

 

“ _Temple_!”

 

Connor barely heard him. It was like something out of a storybook – a small ground of men on horses, thick cloaks and bright surcoats beneath, bright brass fittings on their horses’ tack clinking quietly, and one man in particular wearing a red cloak and helmet shined mirror-bright with a gleaming ring of beaten gold around the rim, and trim to his chainmail just barely visible under a mustard-yellow surcoat with a charging black boar on… They spoke quietly, tone serious and full of gravitas, musical words Connor didn’t, couldn’t understand, and Connor breathed a single awestruck _wow_ aloud before Rees grabbed him by the back of his collar and forcibly dragged him backwards, through the anomaly.

 

Connor spluttered. “Oi!”

 

“Your two minutes were up,” Rees informed him a little snidely, and said to Tate: “Sir. Can I suggest you return to your house, lock your doors, and turn your lights off if they can be seen from the outside? As a precaution. We need to return to HQ. _Now_ , Temple, no arguments!”

 

“I’m not arguing, but – wow, Rees, did you _see_?”

 

“Temple, we need to be _out_ of here. Move it. Sir, we should be back shortly, apologies for disturbing you.”

 

Only when they were back in the jeep and driving away, the farm’s location fixed as a point of interest in the GPS, did Rees lean forward and tap Connor on the shoulder. “Temple?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I did see.” A small pause. “It was fucking beautiful, wasn’t it?”

 

Connor leant back, and a small, disbelieving smile crossed his face. “King Arthur. I just… I can’t get over that. _King Arthur_.”

 

“It was,” Rees said, quietly incredulous. “Wasn’t it?”


	7. Chapter 7

            “Morris,” a quiet voice said, and Jenny glanced sideways without moving her head. They had holed up in Morris’s bedroom, a cupboard of a room that she didn’t have to share with anyone and where Redford wouldn’t venture. The latter didn’t seem to apply to the students, who – given the events of the last hour or so – looked on Morris as their sole adult confidante, the keeper of their phones and their one friendly contact with the demented adults who had taken over a rather boring requirement for their degree and turned it into something dangerous and horrible.

 

Jenny had sole command of the desk, which Morris had cleared almost apologetically, and was using internal ARC email to chat backwards and forwards with Lorraine as Lorraine plugged potential holes in their secrecy, applied for D-Notices and called in favours, and Jenny began to put together cover stories, weave together discrediting fragments of rumour. Morris, ashamed but clearly more loyal to Becker than to the professor she seemed to have been so attached to, was being a great help. Still, the students were more scared of the unknown than they were of the strangers occupying Morris’s room, including the purple-haired pixie of a kid who had just knocked.

 

“Come in, Chloe, it’s okay,” Morris said quietly. She was slumped loosely cross-legged at the head of her bed, reading journal articles on her laptop, one leg stretched out to touch Becker where he sat comfortably on the side toying with his phone, shotgun to hand. Stephen had taken one look at the state of the room with him in it – overfilled wasn’t the word – and had made an excuse to go back outside, tinkering with the radio headset and talking to Connor and Abby, chasing the anomaly and the creature respectively. Still, even without Stephen looming prettily in the background, they must make an intimidating group.

 

The purple-haired girl, Chloe, limped inside.

 

“Sit down,” Becker said, and Jenny couldn’t see him but she knew that chocolate-rich, conciliatory tone, knew he was giving the student the warming, soothing smile that made you feel like you were the only one he listened to or cared about. “Is your ankle hurting you?”

 

“Yeah. Uh. What about – your gun?”

 

“The safety catch is on,” Becker said.

 

Jenny heard Morris shift. “Sit where I was, Chloe. Plenty of room between you and Beck’s shiny, lethal teddy bear.”

 

Chloe – Chloe Aarons: small, heavily made-up, bright-eyed; flirted with Becker and collaborated with Morris and specifically wasn’t told Rob, Tash and Josh were going to the pub because she might tattle, Jenny remembered her now – stumped over and sat down. She giggled quietly at Morris’s comment, but there was no heart in it.

 

“We just. I just wondered,” Chloe said, rather tentatively. Jenny felt Chloe’s wary look at her glance burning off her shoulder. “Natasha? Did they find Tash?”

 

“The police found her,” Becker said. “She’s been taken to hospital, prognosis good. She fell into a ditch and broke a leg, but didn’t cry out, so the Andrewsarchus hardly noticed her in comparison to her screaming friends. She’s very, very lucky, and very, very brave.”

 

“When did you find out?” Chloe said, her voice a little sharper.

 

“Jenny picked up the call from the hospital just now,” Morris said. She sounded tired. “I’m sorry we didn’t come to tell you immediately. But it was low priority compared to some other stuff.”

 

“Other stuff?” Chloe prompted, and when neither Morris nor Becker obliged she followed up with: “Is the professor kicking up a fuss?”

 

“Professor Redford is kicking up a massive fuss,” Becker said. “And being filthy rich he has lots of cash to do it with. Jenny is stopping him from kicking up a fuss in a fashion that will only make things more dangerous for everyone involved.”

 

There was a brief silence. “Oh,” Chloe said. “Okay.” She paused. “I’ll just, like, go away. Because you’re busy.”

 

“Need a hand down the stairs?” Morris offered.

 

“Um, no,” Chloe said. “I’m okay, thanks. I don’t want to go down there, they’re all – they’re stupid.” She paused. “I might go and sit with Josh. So he’s not on his own.”

 

“He’ll really appreciate that when he wakes up,” Becker said, back to the chocolate soothing voice again. “It’s good not to be alone.”

 

Chloe mumbled something – Jenny could practically hear the girl blushing – and swung herself away, crutch clicking awkwardly on the floor.

 

Jenny wondered if it was Morris who sat with Becker when the nightmares were too bad, or who was just there when he needed someone. She didn’t know of any other potential candidates for him. And then she asked herself who would be there if she needed someone to sit by her while she slept, and thought of Sarah and, despite the conspiracy theories and PR disasters taking shape around her, she smiled.

 

***

 

 

            “… No.  No, trust me on this one,” Jenny was saying calmly but firmly to the sceptical but tentatively excited _Times_ editor on the phone half an hour later, when Stephen came in. “Neil Redford has got the wrong end of the stick. He’s confused an operation to remove a dangerous wild animal from a place where it’s a risk to the public with a local group of historical enthusiasts who like to dress up and ride around playing Knights of the Round Table, and his students, of course, think it’s absolutely hilarious and play it up as much as they can. Meanwhile, the locals think it’s a great joke too, a fantastic way of playing a trick on the incomers, particularly because Redford’s students aren’t very popular down in the village. So they’re only fuelling the fire. We’ve been turning local news away and we had to field a call from the BBC only a few minutes ago.”

 

            She flapped a hand at Stephen, who was hovering in the doorway, and he came in and leant against a wall rather than trying to carve out a space on the bed, which Becker and Morris appeared to have colonised between them. She listened carefully to the _Times’_ next  comment, and a carefully-managed sorrowing expression passed across her face as she injected just the right amount of genuine tragedy into her voice for her rebuttal. It wasn’t hard. The look on Josh Marriott’s sheet-white face wouldn’t leave her mind.

 

            “Yes, we can confirm that there has been one death, but we haven’t yet tracked down next of kin, so naturally I can’t give you a name. A horrible accident. A few of the students decided to sneak out of their accommodation and go to the pub to prove how brave they were – you know what teenagers are like – and they were attacked by the feral dog on their way back. One died, one made it back safely, although of course he’s in a state of shock, and the last remaining member of the group has been found and taken to hospital with a broken leg.”

 

            Now surprise was required: Jenny drew on the emotion and it came to her, colouring her solemn tone. “Immense? No. Not at all. I mean, it is an unusually large breed, or rather cross-breed, of dog. And of course unusually aggressive – someone unused to big dogs would think it was extremely large and frightening. We have reason to believe that it may have been bred for fighting, we intend to hand the case over to the proper authorities for investigation just as soon as we’ve segregated the problem animal, and we have every confidence that arrests will be made. We’re pursuing several leads.”

 

            A shorter pause than before, and no special reaction required. “Yes, we’ve asked the general public to stay indoors, exercise caution and on no account to approach any strange animals. This animal is not going to simply go away and it’s not going to stop attacking humans. We’re aware of that, and we’re taking all the necessary precautions prior to bringing this unhappy episode to a close. Yes, the animal will need to be destroyed. We had hoped before the students were attacked that a more peaceful conclusion would be on the cards, but that’s just not a possibility any more.”

 

            The _Times_ editor seemed to be longing for the juicy story, and unwilling to let the possibility of it go, but Jenny knew journalists and she knew that this one was close to letting the story slip regretfully through his fingers – he just needed one little push. She laughed and flipped her hair over one shoulder, consciously relaxing in her chair in the hope that her deliberately easygoing behaviour would spill over into her voice. “Oh, Jeremy. Have you spoken to Neil Redford? Let me tell you, he seems lovely on TV but the man’s absolutely pigheaded. He gets an idea into his brain and he just will not let it go. I know it sounds fantastic, real front-page material, but Jeremy, it won’t  stand up. Lily Waverley, the _Telegraph_ editor, she knows Redford quite well, and _she_ wouldn’t take the story.”

 

            Jenny kept to herself the fact that the reason Lily Waverley wouldn’t take the story was that she had been at school with Jenny, and Jenny had been her prefect and a good friend to her since, and therefore Jenny knew rather more about Lily’s teenaged recreational drug use and her younger son’s curious resemblance to his father’s cousin than Lily was prepared to risk. In the tiny hand-mirror Morris had propped up against the wall she could see Stephen looking vaguely awed in the background, and she smiled reassuringly into the mirror so he could see it. On the other end of the phone, the _Times_ editor was downcast but philosophical.

 

            “Tell you what, Jeremy,” Jenny said, being a firm believer in following up the stick of ‘don’t you dare publish that’ with the carrot of ‘but here’s something you can publish’, “I’ll get back to you as soon as the immediate emergency is resolved and give you the full details. We may be able to scrounge up some pictures, too. Potentially one of the students will be prepared to speak to you as well, although they’re all feeling a little vulnerable right now.” Jenny had a sudden thought, and scribbled down a reminder to herself to speak to Connor about a potential website for the wholly fictional Egloshayle Round Table Society, on who she intended to blame the chivalric horses and riders the students had seen.

 

            “Yes,” she said absently. “Yes. Sorry this story is a dud. Glad to be of use. Bye.”

 

            She put the phone down and turned around. “Stephen.”

 

            “Sometimes I wonder if you’re magic,” Stephen said, with what Jenny considered to be an appropriate level of awe and respect.

 

            “She’s been at it for hours,” Morris said without taking her eyes off her work, sheets of printed paper in front of her which she was editing with a red biro. She was now lounging down one side of the bed; Becker was lounging down the other. Jenny was not sure how either of them was successfully balancing, but they seemed to be managing. “She’s seen off the _Telegraph_ , the _Express and Echo_ , the BBC, and that was the _Times_ on the line. Beck’s keeping score.”

 

            Becker nodded when Stephen glanced enquiringly at him. “Ten-nil to Miss Lewis.”

 

            “How have you managed to award me ten points for dealing with four journalists?” Jenny enquired, enjoying her moment of glory and prepared to let a little dignity go for the sake of it. In the absence of coffee, amusement would do. Becker looked mildly concerned, as if he hadn’t expected her to ask, and didn’t especially want to explain himself.

 

            “Double points if they’re editors, so that’s six,” Morris said, still without looking up. “The _Express and Echo_ called twice, that’s seven. You also got shot of Defra, we awarded two points for that because you’re meant to be working for the Home Office and yet you managed to chase them off your turf without compromising that image. And your friend back at your headquarters has seen off Sky and the _Daily Mail_ as well, using your cover story, that’s ten.” She glanced up, over the rims of her spectacles, looking absurdly young as she chewed the end of her biro. “Half a point for someone getting rid of journalists and such using your cover story, in case you were wondering.”

 

            Jenny was momentarily stunned, but recovered. “Is there money riding on this?”

 

            Morris removed her pen from her mouth, the better to stare incredulously at her. “No.”

 

            “I met Lieutenant Lyle on the stairs, so yes,” Becker corrected. “Odds are two to one you’ll hit twenty before midnight.”

 

            Jenny mentally considered the number of influential people she’d already disposed of, Professor Redford’s star quality, and the remaining potential for disaster, and then performed a separate calculation involving anomaly team morale and hypothetical financial losses. “Put me down for a fiver, will you?”

 

            Commendably, Becker only blinked and then made a note in his book. “Yes ma’am.”

 

            Stephen was grinning to himself when Jenny looked back at him, that quiet, private smile that he sometimes wore when he felt he could admit that he was fond of the rest of the team and they were amusing him. She was touched when her noticing it didn’t chase the grin right off his face, as if he didn’t mind that she knew.

 

            “You wanted something?” she said.

 

            Stephen nodded. “I reckon it’s time to reassess the situation.” He waved his mobile phone.

 

            Jenny bit back a sigh. “In here?”

 

            “It’s quieter,” Stephen offered, although she was sure he knew that if he sat down he would take up all the remaining floorspace.

 

            “I can go,” Morris said.

 

            “I don’t want to throw you out of your room,” Jenny said, although she knew that the only other available space was the breakfast room, where the students were being fed a belated meal of takeaway.

 

            “We have an order of Indian takeaway coming anyway,” Becker told her. “Apparently the students like the Chinese sold around here, but it’s manky. We’ve got enough for the whole team.”

 

            “How did you know what to order?” Stephen said, sounding faintly baffled.

 

            “This isn’t the first time we’ve needed food and had to order in,” Becker said evasively. Jenny knew for a fact they had only had to get Indian takeaway in twice while he’d been around.

 

            “Beck has an eidetic memory,” Morris said matter-of-factly. “Revolting little bastard. He reads stuff and remembers it perfectly, which is why he likes exams.”

 

            “I do not like exams,” Becker said, faintly pink about the ears. “That’s libel.”

 

            “Not if it’s true,” Morris said. Becker scooped up her laptop and ushered her firmly out of the room.

 

            “New and hidden depths,” Stephen remarked, staring after him.

 

            “You _really_ can’t talk,” Jenny said tartly, recalling some of the choice titbits of information about Stephen that had suddenly become apparent over the years – and even more interesting, those that hadn’t. She sighed. “Team conference.”

 

            Stephen nodded and sat down on the bed. “You call Connor, I’ll call Abby.”

 

            Jenny selected Abby’s number on her contacts list, and rang it, while Stephen did the same for Connor. Both picked up immediately, and Jenny could hear Stephen explaining the situation to Connor.

 

            “This is an okay time to talk,” Abby said tentatively. “I mean, we’re watching it, it’s not going anywhere, I don’t think.”

 

            “Okay, good,” Jenny said. “Putting you on speaker phone.”

 

            “Uh-huh,” Abby said, and Jenny clicked the requisite button on her phone and placed the phone on the bed, next to Stephen’s.

 

            “First things first,” Stephen said. “Can we all hear each other?”

 

            “Yes,” Jenny said obediently, and seconds later Connor and Abby chimed in.

 

            “We have three problems, I think?” Stephen said, glancing at Jenny. “The publicity, the creature, and the anomaly. Jenny, you go first.”

 

            “Well, in terms of the publicity, I think a catastrophe has been toned down to a disaster,” Jenny said. “The students are relatively docile, their phones are still in my custody and any videos and photographs have been recorded for ARC use and deleted. Redford’s at least a little discredited, and quite a few of the major news outlets have been chased off. I’m no longer as concerned as I was, although Natasha George, Josh Marriott and Robert Aske’s family are a worry. That will need careful handling. I’ve sent a note through to Lorraine, who’s put the word out to Lester and the PR department.”

 

            “Good,” Stephen said. “Abby?”

 

            He was getting better at directing traffic, Jenny noted, and then settled in to listen to Abby.

 

            “It’s quiet at the moment,” Abby said, then hesitated. “Well, it’s eating a cow. It’s not going anywhere. We’ve been sitting watching it for the past twenty minutes. It’s on National Trust land, I think. It crashed through a fence like it wasn’t even there.”

 

            “What do you reckon our chances are of getting it peacefully back through its anomaly?”

 

            Abby hesitated again. “Small,” she said finally, and Jenny knew that meant _zero_. “It has no incentive to go. There’s food, there aren’t any predators or any competition, and it’s clearly been in and out before. If the, um, the people were any indication, it’s preyed on humans before – or tried to.” A pause, and then Abby spoke even more reluctantly. “I don’t think tranquilising it is feasible. It’s just too big. It’s even bigger than the young chalicothere we took down. A dose for an elephant might do it, but I wouldn’t – in terms of other people’s safety I wouldn’t want to take the chance.”

 

            “I agree,” Stephen said quietly.

 

            Jenny let them have their moment of pained animal-lover misery; she sympathised with their insistence that the creatures should be returned unharmed to their own time periods wherever that was practical, but had a marked lack of empathy for this particular creature. “Connor. The anomaly, or anomalies, plural?”

 

            “We only found one. And we’ve been all over the country. We’re still looking. Ross’s driving makes Thorpe Park look tame.”

 

            “Passing over Ross’s driving,” Stephen said patiently.

 

            “Right.” Connor coughed, as if embarrassed. “Well, like I said, only found one. It’s in a field belonging to a Mr Tate? He says his son’s seen stuff coming out of it, like a giant wolf, but we had a quick look and it’s definitely not the Eocene.”

 

            Jenny glanced at Stephen, who took on his teacherly aspect. This was a well-practised façade, and the most open Stephen got with other people. Jenny gathered from Connor that Cutter was a great teacher, but tended to leave small holes in his lectures or forget to remind people that Dr Tom Warrington, not to be confused with Professor Elizabeth Harrington, was the ‘idiot with his head jammed so far up his arse that he can see daylight’ that he kept referring to. Over the past decade or so, Stephen had stepped into the breach, first for CMU’s students, and then for the ARC project as a whole.

 

            “The Eocene is when you would expect to find Andrewsarchus,” Stephen said. “First flowers, early grasses, pretty tropical. Increasingly big mammals. Andrewsarchus was probably the apex predator.”

 

            “Um, yeah,” Connor said, as Jenny nodded her thanks and understanding. “Anyway. Definitely not the Eocene. It was snowing, there were brambles, and also, _also_ , get this, this is _so cool_ , we think we saw _King Arthur_.”

 

            The other members of the anomaly team were temporarily dumbfounded. Stephen and Jenny both automatically looked to Abby to prise some sense out of Connor, but of course, Abby wasn’t actually there.

 

            “Wait – Connor, what?” Abby said, right on cue.

 

            “Well, there were a bunch of armed men on horses, and one of them had like this helmet with a gold ring on it, right, and gold-trimmed armour, and the best horse, and a surcoat like the one the dead guy from earlier was wearing, and I reckon if King Arthur’s anyone that’s going to be him, right? I mean, Morris said he was called a war leader.”

 

            “O-kay,” Stephen said. “But _not_ the Eocene.”

 

            “What?”

 

            “The anomaly.”

 

            “Oh. Er, no, definitely not the Eocene.”

 

            Stephen rubbed his chin. He clearly hadn’t shaved for a bit; there was a slight rasping noise. “So there must be another anomaly.”

 

            “Um. See, I don’t think there is one,” Connor said, voice tinny and worried through the phone’s speakers. “We couldn’t find it. And believe me, we looked everywhere.”

 

            “Most creatures will go back through their home anomaly if it still exists when they’re bored with our time period,” Stephen said in the tones of someone thinking aloud, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “This one has been here for – how long? And it’s not going anywhere.”

 

            “It’s a killer,” Abby said, voice heavy with frustration and upset. Jenny knew she hated to condemn any creature. “If there’s no anomaly, I don’t think we have a choice but to get rid of it.”

 

            “Er, guys. There was another problem.” Connor sounded deeply apologetic, and then he yelped. “Jesus Christ, Ross. Don’t mow down people on bikes.”

 

            There was a brief interlude while Connor’s team evidently stopped and had words with the ill-advised cyclist, culminating in bad language and strongly worded reprimands, but eventually Connor got back on the line and explained that he, Rees and Jenkins had departed from the anomaly because they had seen the alleged King Arthur and his retinue headed directly for it, and they weren’t sure if they had come through or not.

 

            Stephen caught Jenny’s eye. “Shit,” he said.

 

            “Well,” Jenny said. “We’ve got bigger problems. I can’t honestly believe I just said that we have bigger problems than the Once and Future King potentially roaming the countryside, but we do. They’re unlikely to do any harm. If the students’ testimony is any indication, they’ve been through several times and no-one’s been hurt. They might startle a few people, but I doubt anyone will take them seriously.”

 

            “And it’s night-time,” Stephen said practically. “There won’t be too many people about in the first place. So our biggest immediate problem is the Andrewsarchus.” He chewed his lower lip. “I don’t want to take on a nocturnal predator that size in the night if I have any choice in the matter.”

 

            “No,” Abby said definitely. Over the phone line, Jenny heard her sigh. “It’s not doing anything right now. If we watch it, keep it where we can see it, then confront it in daylight – or at least dawn – then I think we have a better chance of preventing any more deaths.”

 

            Jenny, not being a tactician, sat back and listened while Abby and Stephen thrashed out the possibilities with relation to confronting the creature, and Stephen undertook to discuss it with Captain Stringer and then update everyone. Then she took over, and laid down the law on the subject of sleep and food, knowing that Stephen would certainly remember to make plans with Captain Stringer and even more certainly remember to make sure that everyone was clear on what those plans were, but would certainly not remember minor problems like eating or sleeping.

 

            In the end, they settled for eating now, and then sleeping for a few hours, setting mobile phone alarms for three o’clock or so in order to be up to descend on the creature. Abby and Connor would both return; a different team of soldiers would take Abby’s place watching the creature to make sure it didn’t do anything. They had a plan all worked out, and Jenny felt the first shiverings of nervousness as she realised that now they had to carry it out.

 

            Becker knocked politely on the door, then toed it open with one size ten boot. “Food,” he said, put down the tray he was carrying, and took from it a plate of biriyani with sag paneer and a Diet Coke for Jenny, and a Cobra beer, chicken tikka and a small mountain of chapaatis for Stephen. “Connor’s and Abby’s are in the kitchen, wrapped in tinfoil.”

 

            “They should be back soon,” Jenny said, accepting her food. “Where are you eating?”

 

            “Downstairs. Breakfast room. The students have cleared out and holed up in the games room. Nobody seems too keen on going to bed.”

 

            “I wonder why,” Jenny said, and caught Stephen’s eye.

 

            Stephen nodded. “Can we join you?” he said to Becker, who gave a small, surprised smile, and then nodded.

 

            Becker had definitely had a point earlier. There were times when it was good not to be alone.


	8. Chapter 8

           

            Lester sat back in his chair, stretching muscles aching and sluggish with inactivity, and listened as Jenny summarised the anomaly team’s plan of action.

 

            “I know it’s not ideal,” Jenny finished. “But even Abby thinks this creature needs destroying, and Captain Stringer is very clear that with the firepower and men we have, engaging the creature in darkness is far from the ideal. Especially since it’s most comfortable at night.”

 

            “You’re on the ground, Jenny, not me,” Lester pointed out acidly, hearing Jenny’s faint irritation that something couldn’t be done right now in her voice. “For what it’s worth, I have no reason to question that assessment. How are things on the publicity side? Miss Wickes spent an unhappy two hours repelling boarders, but we seem to be doing reasonably well at this end.”

 

            “Fair to middling,” Jenny said. “Redford’s having a lot of trouble getting his story out, and the students are – well, the students seem prepared to keep quiet. We’ll need to speak to them individually afterwards in the mopping up, but, well, that’s standard operating procedure – I wouldn’t expect anything else. Redford’s PhD student, Becker’s friend, won’t say a word.”

 

            “I thought Becker could keep her quiet,” Lester agreed, tapping his pen against the blotter on his glass table.

 

            “I think she’ll keep quiet for Becker’s sake,” Jenny corrected carefully.

 

            “A distinction without a difference.” Lester felt his mobile buzz, fished it from his pocket, and realised he had a text from his daughter.

 

 _Your dinner’s in the fridge, we don’t have a cat_ , it read.

 

            _I love you too_ , Lester texted back, with a small, fond smile, and then added cheekily: _How’s Juliet?_

 

            “James, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with you there,” Jenny said, politely but firmly, and equally politely but firmly changed the subject. “Will you be remaining at the ARC?”

 

            Lester pinched the bridge of his nose and thought, weighing up the fact that Liz would be happy if he came back home, the fact that an emergency related to the creature couldn’t be ruled out, and the fact that it was now eleven o’clock and the anomaly team were planning to be on the move at three, so he should be up and awake at that time too. “Yes,” he said reluctantly. “I can get a few hours’ sleep in a bunkroom, if Lorraine’s prepared to hold the fort.”

 

            “Blade is here,” Jenny said dryly. “She will be.”

 

            Lester made a face. “Of all the unnecessary remarks.” His phone buzzed again, and he glanced at it. The message was from Juliet, his daughter’s girlfriend, who was clearly keeping Liz company – probably at the flat rather than Juliet’s house, since Liz had been cooking. He could practically hear their laughter as they composed it.

 

            _Hi Mr Lester. Liz said you were asking after me, so I thought I’d say hi and tell you I’m looking after Liz and she’s being a very good girl – ate all her greens and did all her homework. Hope work is okay!_ _J_ _J_

 

            “Bloody cheek,” Lester said out loud, corners of his mouth twitching, and then added hastily: “Not you, Jenny.”

 

            “I should hope not, James,” Jenny replied. “If you’ll excuse me – I think I’d better get some sleep.”

 

            “Certainly,” Lester said politely, and rang off. He got up and went next door. Lorraine Wickes was not visibly startled; she also appeared to have run out of paperwork, since there was nothing but her computer in front of her, and she was typing only sporadically. That accounted for the steady stream of forms to be signed materialising on his desk, then; it must be passing through Lorraine’s capable hands and straight into his. Lester wondered how on earth she was occupying herself; the woman wasn’t an automaton, and she was surely just as liable to get bored as anyone else.

 

            Lorraine smiled at him. “Sir. Can I help?”

 

            “The anomaly team are going to be in Cornwall until at least tomorrow morning,” Lester said bluntly, and ran a hand through his hair. He knew it would stick up a bit, but he was of the opinion that slightly dishevelled was, if not acceptable, at least tolerable at this hour of the night. “The creature is going to have to be destroyed; they’re planning a full-scale attack just before dawn tomorrow morning.”

 

            Lorraine barely twitched. “Miss Maitland and Dr Hart will be pleased.”

 

            Lester’s mouth twisted. “Yes, well. I was hoping to get a little sleep before the action begins. Are you prepared to hold on here until three?”

 

            Lorraine just nodded, and pulled the coffee mug on her desk a little closer. “Of course, sir.”

 

            Lester considered saying that he was sorry for all this, sorry for dragging out someone who already worked immense amounts of unpaid or poorly remunerated overtime on a weekend, and then thought that that would be alien to his and Lorraine’s working relationship, and in any case she understood perfectly well. He nodded in return, and made a note to put her forward for some sort of commendation or maybe recommend her to someone who needed a competent, hardworking, efficient colleague and was prepared to pay good money for them – he needed to do something to say thank you. He had an alarming thought that this might be an excess of Christmas spirit, and then dismissed it. “Thank you, Miss Wickes. May I help you to a coffee?”

 

            “That would be very kind of you, sir,” Lorraine said, skilfully concealing any startlement with the kind of poker face cultivated over years in the civil service, and Lester scooped up her mug and headed towards the rec room.

 

            After bringing her her coffee and going away quietly – she was on the phone to Major Ryan, tweaking the reserve duty roster in light of confirmation of the anomaly team’s plans – he picked up a small, elegant overnight bag from his locker, which was pristine and usually never touched, and headed to the men’s changing room. He brushed his teeth, washed his face and combed his hair, then slipped these necessities back into the overnight bag and proceeded to the bunkrooms. He found one that was unoccupied and commandeered it for himself, bolting the door behind him and changing quickly into a pair of soft grey trousers that were, to all intents and purposes, very expensive and very comfortable tracksuit bottoms, and a t-shirt that was several sizes too large for his thin frame and announced membership of a caving club he had never belonged to. He hung his suit up on a wooden hanger retrieved from the bag for this very purpose, draped his shirt neatly over the sole chair in the bunkroom, and lined his shoes up neatly under the bottom bunk he had selected as acceptable.

 

            Just as he was getting into bed, the phone rang, but he had anticipated the caller’s intentions, and it was lying on the duvet beside him. He picked it up, lay back, and shut his eyes. “Jon.”

 

            “Sweetums,” Lyle greeted him brightly, completely failing to sound tired. “How’s tricks?”

 

            “Tricks fully intended to get a few hours’ sleep before your motley lot descended on the latest fluffy mass-murderer,” Lester retorted, feeling himself relax a little.

 

            “Aw, did he? I’m due a few hours’ kip.” Lyle’s voice twisted in the way it did when he stretched and half-yawned. “Not a lot of room in the inn, though. I mean youth hostel. Although God knows how much immaculate conception is going on in the rooms upstairs…”

 

            “I presume He does,” Lester said dryly. “Are you all right?”

 

            “Fine, fine,” Lyle said. “Not getting into trouble, if that’s what you mean. Liz OK?”

 

            “I heard from her a few minutes ago; a little sarcastic, but business as usual, really. She’s got Juliet with her, so I’m presuming she’s fine.”

 

            Lyle laughed. “I just bet.”

 

            Lester smiled. “Juliet is a good influence.”

 

            “Mm. And you’re a good influence on me.”

 

            Lester could hear the smile in Lyle’s voice. “A very different sort of good influence, I suspect.”

 

            Lyle laughed again, this one significantly dirtier. “I bloody hope so.”

 

            “See you tomorrow, Jon,” Lester said. “Try not to blow up any national treasures.”

 

            “It’s an effort, but I’ll manage. Hey – love you.”

 

            That never failed to steal Lester’s breath away, no matter how casually Lyle said it, no matter how often he heard it, whether in explicit words or hidden in implications or written all over his actions. He just about managed to respond, and by the time he was off the phone again, he was breathing normally – even if he was wearing a distinctly silly smile on his face.

           

            He didn’t even allow himself to consider the possibility that things might go wrong tomorrow. The anomaly team were good at their jobs, and they knew what they were doing, and they knew a lot more about minimising casualties than they had done years ago when all they’d had to go by was some guns, Cutter’s mad tangents, and Connor playing his favourite party game with pens and anomalies and more valuable items like mobiles, house keys and a ring he had uncharacteristically ignored Ryan’s orders to get back.

 

            No point brooding, James Lester told himself firmly, and went to sleep.

 

***

 

The creature had moved in the night. Not far – only back to the dig site, a piece of information that made Morris look moderately depressed, and only at half-past three, as the anomaly team were rubbing sleep out of their eyes and drinking gallons of coffee, so their plans were not more than slightly disarranged. Jenny thanked whatever deities might be up there for saving her from negotiating entrance to National Trust land with a small army and slightly larger arsenal, and Captain Stringer considered the practicalities of confronting the creature on a battlefield that, of necessity, contained several large and important holes ideally placed for falling into with a look on his face that suggested the students’ vocabulary would be about to expand very shortly.

 

Outside, the sky was charcoal, with only the faintest glimmers of dawn to guide them, and Stephen wished they could wait perhaps half an hour for the light to spread. The creature might not be discomfited by light, but the whole point of waiting had been to avoid having to try to bring it down in the darkness when it was most at home. He stood on the steps and waited for the team to collect around him, carrying an actual rifle rather than a tranquiliser rifle on his back this time. Jenny would be staying behind to keep an eye on Redford, which meant Becker was on Redford Wrangling duty, as Blade couldn’t be spared and it was Blade’s considered opinion that if Miss Lewis had to tell Redford where he got off again, Redford would try to take a swing at her. Becker was cuddling his shotgun again, Stephen noted, either because he knew the students had been eyeing it with a gruesome mixture of interest and revulsion or because he really did use it as a teddy. Connor and Abby would be coming with him, Stephen thought, and felt obscurely comforted by that. Abby was standing beside him, pretending not to mind the cold; Connor was crouched on the step, nose buried in the collection of scarves wrapped round his throat, eyes flickering over the collection of grim men and equally grim weaponry in front of them.

 

“Hey, Abs,” Connor said. “Do you think I get a gun this time?”

 

Abby smiled in recollection of the running joke – they all knew that the apocalypse would have to be well on its way before Connor was allowed anything more dangerous than a water pistol. “No, Conn. I don’t think you do.”

 

 “Is that a _rocket launcher_?” Stephen said, temporarily distracted.

 

Connor’s mouth fell open as he followed Stephen’s gaze to the three shoulder-mounted rocket launchers neatly lined up in the back of a jeep, about to be covered by a tarp for the prevention of sharp-eyed civilians spotting them. “Oh my God. It is.”

 

 Becker, on his way back inside, nudged him with one booted foot. “You’re catching flies, Temple.”

 

“Where did we get a rocket launcher?” Stephen demanded. He’d only slept for a couple of hours and those had definitely not been there when he’d gone to sleep. “Where did we get _three_ rocket launchers?”

 

“Maybe we’ve been good girls and boys this year?” Becker hazarded, and bellowed “ _Coming_!” in response to Morris bawling his name. Stephen would say this much for that woman; she did have a pair of decent lungs on her.

 

Captain Stringer, going in the other direction, shook his head. “Ready to move out, Hart?”

 

Stephen nodded and made his way towards the jeep favoured by the scientists, which Kermit was driving, since Stephen needed his hands free - Connor was too cautious behind the wheel, and Abby always seemed to be in training for a third career as a drag racer. “Where did the rocket launchers come from?” he asked Stringer. “And do we really need three?”

 

Stringer shrugged. “Becker called in a favour, apparently. Popped his head around the door at about midnight and observed that he wouldn’t want to take on a monster like this one with anything less than a rocket launcher, at which point I agreed with him, and two hours later… As for needing three, I’d rather have overkill than get killed.”

 

Stephen decided to pass over the last statement. “Not Santa, then?”

 

“Given that I’m pretty sure ninety percent of us belong on the naughty list, I don’t think so.” Stringer shook his head. “How the hell he did it, I don’t know.”

 

“Nice of him,” Abby said, already sitting in the jeep and flicking through something on her phone – Stephen could see the default background to the ARC’s internal mail program, and guessed that she was looking through the tips he’d sent her weeks before on handling very, very large animals.

 

Stephen and Stringer both looked at her. “Well, that’s certainly one way of putting it, miss,” Stringer observed.

 

“If there’s another way, then tell me another time,” Abby said, in the kind of tone that brooked no argument. She caught Stephen’s eye, and her own were hard ice-blue. “Time’s wasting.”

 

Stephen nodded sharply, and climbed into his own seat in the car. Connor was already waiting, jittery in the way he got when he’d woken early and drunk coffee rather than eaten breakfast; Stephen wasn’t sure he’d slept at all. “Let’s go, Kermit,” Stephen said, and quietly prayed that all the people in the jeeps now streaming away from the hostel would be coming back later.

 

 

The creature was on the move again, loping through the grey dawn light. Adey and Fiver reported that it had sniffed around the dig site a bit, paying close attention to the place where the horse and rider had been brought down, and had then noticed them; it had snarled at them and charged away howling, and they had followed at a safe distance, increasing that as it slowed to an easy lope. The radio crackled harder and harder as Adey spoke, then cut off entirely, just as he was naming the lane they were driving along and a small church they had just passed, shocking the unfortunate cleric standing paralysed in the church porch.

 

“Tate’s farm,” Connor said, leaning forward, “it must be going to the anomaly at Tate’s farm, there’s a church like that down that way,” and started to give directions. The jeep was tense and silent, the only sound the roar of the engine as Kermit broke every speed limit signposted in the knowledge that the creature was heading for somewhere people lived, and Stephen’s fingers were white on his rifle. Abby leant forward too and grasped his shoulder, but when he looked back at her she was staring white-faced out of the windscreen, her lower lip caught tightly between her teeth. He knew she was still hoping for the peaceful solution she wasn’t going to get.

 

Kermit leapt on the brakes as the ARC’s last remaining jeep suddenly came into view, haphazardly parked on the verge with Adey and Fiver standing beside it. Wordlessly, Fiver pointed at the field they were standing in front of, a piece of common land just down the way from the farm Connor had thought the creature was going to, with a hedge and stile facing onto the road that had been wrecked by the creature, and with a jolt to his heart Stephen spotted the animal, standing comfortably most of the way up the field, sniffing the air. Part of Stephen’s brain that wasn’t awed by the creature’s sheer size and menace noted that Adey and Fiver were well downwind of it, and shielded from its gaze by the car.

 

Most of the potential plans they had run through assumed the creature would attack them on sight, the way it had gone after the students, even if they had to attract its attention by making noise, but it didn’t seem to have noticed them. Its eyesight must be relatively poor; perhaps it hunted by hearing, given that Tash George had evaded it with silence. Abby glanced up at Stephen.

 

“It’s not attacking,” she said, her voice still hard, but with an anguished edge to it. “Stephen, if it doesn’t go after us – we can’t just go for it.”

 

Captain Stringer had a look on his face that suggested he could, and he would, do such a thing, but he said nothing, and there were a few more moments of horrible stalemate as the soldiers spread out and started to move forward, over the trampled hedge, as quiet as they could be, three of them holding rocket launchers, and the creature still hadn’t noticed them. A gunmetal-grey sky glowered down at them, and the dull green and brown of the winter fields answered, and Stephen felt like he was going to choke on the sick dread of anticipation the same way he always did, and then –

 

A yell and a series of barks from down the lane split the air and Stephen’s head cracked round so fast he got whiplash. A young teenager was running down the lane, chasing a large baying dog, and Stephen’s head whipped back as he heard an answering howl from the creature at the top of the field, and his own rifle was shouldered and ready before he’d really registered what was happening. The kid flung himself on top of the dog, but it was still barking, and in any case the damage was done; the Andrewsarchus’ muscles bunched and it leapt forward, and Stringer gave the order to open fire.

 

For a split second Stephen thought it wouldn’t come down. The hard clatter of the rifle fire filled the air, and yet the creature was still coming on, even though the bullets were finding their mark, and then there were matching crumps and whooshes as two of the rocket launchers fired, and the rockets hit and exploded and the creature’s entire front half blew to pieces.

 

In the strange new silence, the first sound Stephen heard was the kid with the dog squeaking in horror.

                                                                                           

“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” he was babbling, “Duke got out and Dad said I had to keep them in in case the wolf came back, oh my god was that the wolf, that’s disgusting, how did you do that, I’m sorry, I’m really really sorry –”

 

“It’s okay,” Abby said, patting the kid on the shoulder. “It’s fine. You’re safe, the creature’s gone,” but she met Stephen’s eyes, and Stephen knew her well enough to read what she was thinking: _is it really this easy_ , and the same question they both always asked themselves even when they knew they didn’t need to – _did we give the creature a fair chance?_

 

“We did what we could,” he told her, and the clouds opened, and the first fresh white snowflakes began to fall.


	9. Chapter 9

“It’s over,” Jenny said, sitting down rather hard. “It’s over. The creature’s dead.”

 

The dreading silence in Morris’s bedroom broke in an instant as both Morris and Becker, looking more like sixteen than twenty-six, scrambled to read over Jenny’s shoulder the text Abby had managed to send by standing on a car roof. Jenny mock-scowled at them, and hid the screen. “It was all over very quickly, apparently. A boy spooked the creature and it charged, and Captain Stringer’s men responded with extreme prejudice.”

 

“I thought the rocket launchers would come in handy,” Becker said with mild satisfaction.

 

“I still don’t know where you got those,” Jenny said ominously.

 

“Father Christmas,” Becker answered, perfect poker face in place, and then unbent enough to add: “It was perfectly legal. I just asked a friend to lend a hand, that’s all. And he did so. Perfectly legally.”

 

“Beck stays in touch with his friends,” Morris said brightly, just as Jenny was preparing to enter into a more comprehensive interrogation, and Jenny couldn’t help feeling Morris was doing it on purpose. “We’d be touched if we weren’t pretty sure it’s all a ploy to keep us sweet until we’re useful.”

 

Jenny decided to leave it at that, and glanced out of the window. It was snowing, and the snow was settling, although only a few flakes had fallen so far. “Becker, I want a lift to the scene.”

 

Becker stood. “Of course, ma’am.”

 

“I’m coming too,” Morris announced, and it spoke volumes for how tired Jenny was that she didn’t bother to object. “Just give me five minutes to let the students know.”

 

“What about Redford?” Jenny asked, and didn’t miss the way Morris’s jaw hardened.

 

“What about him?”

 

 

It was not hard to find the scene of the disaster: there were a lot of jeeps, a ruined hedge, and a bloody corpse halfway up the field.

 

“Oh, ew,” Morris said, and parked the car neatly several metres away before climbing out and opening Jenny’s door for her. Becker clambered out too, carrying his shotgun just in case, and made his way over to Stringer. Jenny stood silently for a few seconds, taking in the devastation, and then headed for Abby and Stephen.

 

Abby waved and Stephen nodded. Neither of them smiled.

 

“Is everything all right?” Jenny said.

 

Abby and Stephen turned to look up the field as one, and then back at Jenny. “Well, it’s dead,” Abby said.

 

“I can see that,” Jenny said. “What happened to the boy who spooked it?”

 

“He’s gone back home,” Abby said. “Connor and Matt Rees took him. It’s the farm just up the road there.”  


“Is anyone hurt?”

 

“Finn fell into a ditch two minutes ago,” Stephen said. “Nothing hurt but his dignity. And his uniform. But no, nobody was hurt. It didn’t get near us.”

 

“Well, that’s good,” Jenny said rather uncertainly. She suspected Abby and Stephen were both in shock from the sheer anti-climax of the final confrontation, not helped by the fact that neither of them liked it when the creatures they had to kill proved to be grossly outnumbered and outgunned. She retrieved a thermos from her capacious handbag and handed it over. “Careful. I don’t know how strong this is – Becker made it.”  


“ _Becker_ made it?” Abby said in genuine surprise, accepted the thermos and took a healthy swig, which resulted in an equally healthy hacking cough. “Bloody hell.”

 

Stephen’s lips twitched. “Pass it here, Abs.” Stephen only blinked after his drink, but there was a new light in his eyes. “That’s more whisky than tea.”

 

“I don’t think Captain Becker does things by halves,” Jenny said, and was about to ask for an escort down to the farm when she heard running footsteps and twisted sharply.

 

Connor, Lieutenant Rees, and a teenage boy who must have been the same one who had startled the Andrewsarchus were all charging down the lane. Connor collided with Stephen, and Lieutenant Rees had a very odd excited glitter in his eyes.

 

“Looklook _look_ ,” the boy was saying in a hushed gasp, “coming over the fields, just _look_!”

 

“It’s the historic incursion, sir,” Rees said more clearly to Stringer and Becker, who had arrived as abruptly as if they had teleported over to Jenny, Abby and Stephen. His mouth twitched, and he got it under control. “Er- King Arthur, sir.”

 

There was a mad scramble for a better viewpoint, somewhere where the remains of the hedge weren’t blocking the view of the approaching cavalcade, where they all stopped and stared.

 

Stringer swore softly under his breath. Morris came forward to see better, lurking behind Becker’s shoulder with the look of someone having a religious experience on her face. Abby’s jaw was on the floor, Connor looked absolutely thrilled, and even Stephen looked moderately surprised. Jenny was struggling to keep her facial expressions under control.

 

It was not a particularly large group that had just jumped the fence between the farmland and common land as if it didn’t exist. There were perhaps twenty of them, all mounted, five or six more finely dressed than the others, two of the less finely dressed individuals carrying banners: one banner the now familiar yellow and black boar, the other blue with a stooping hawk. They were all armed and bright, the horses glowing with care, a spot of colour in the soft muted day that brought to mind fairy tales and chivalrous courts and long-gone myths and legends. At the head of the group rode the figure Connor had talked about, someone Jenny hadn’t really believed was real until now: a tall man, with a nose like a knife blade, blue eyes, a weathered face and the bearing of someone used to authority, a man dressed in gold-trimmed chainmail and a gold-trimmed helmet and a blood-red cloak, a man who raised one gauntleted hand and called his followers to a halt in a language Jenny dimly recognised the second he saw them. The snow was still falling, but gently and thinly, coating the beast’s dead body, and for several minutes the soft shush of the snow, the snorting of the horses and the jingling of the tack were the only sounds.

 

Jenny forcibly reminded herself of her eyeliner, and did not rub her eyes to make sure they were working properly, that she wasn’t seeing things.

 

“Welsh,” she heard Morris mutter behind her. “Oh, shit.”

 

The man – King Arthur, Jenny reminded herself – called something across the land.

 

“I hope somebody has a plan,” Stringer said under his breath, “or I am going to make one up in less than two seconds.”

 

“But that was _Latin_ ,” Morris said much more happily, and descended into a hurried conference with Becker, after which Becker glanced quickly at Jenny and Stringer, handed his shotgun off to Stephen and stepped forward.

 

“Pax tecum, dux bellorum,” he said, very carefully and very loudly, and spread his hands to show that they were empty. “Ecce: tutus est. Feram mortuus est.”

 

“What the hell did he just say,” Jenny hissed to Morris, who looked very pleased with herself.

 

“Er – peace be with you, leader in war,” Morris translated. “Look: it’s safe. The beast is dead.” There was a flurry of Latin, and Morris’s eyes almost crossed. “Er – he, that is, Artorius, oh my god, Arthur, gives thanks for this – um, great deed, and requests that they be allowed to remove the body of the beast so that the – er, the people may know… um, what has been done on their behalf.”

 

“Yes please,” said Jenny, who could think of few better Christmas presents than the revolting corpse of a prehistoric creature being taken off her hands.

 

“Oh, good, because that’s what Beck just said,” Morris informed her.

 

            “Well, good for him,” Jenny said tartly, and watched as the less well-dressed men set up an immense arrangement of ropes and travois to drag the body of the beast and dismantled part of the fence to facilitate that. Arthurian Britons were evidently very practical individuals, although perhaps not as practical as the ARC team; Jenny shuddered to think how their shining chainmail and banners would have coped with the Andrewsarchus.

 

“Oh god,” Connor said with a wince. “Tate won’t like that.”

 

“He’ll like it a lot more than a giant wolf terrorising his son,” Jenny pointed out, and then added: “And besides – broken fences are much easier to fix than the alternative.”

 

It took perhaps half an hour for them to manage the load, but it felt like mere moments. Arthur, who had dismounted to direct operations more effectively, remounted as the others departed with the carcass. He gave a dignified bow, before turning and allowing his horse to pick its own way back over the fence.

 

Becker, apparently on impulse, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled after him. “Felix dies Nativitatis!”

 

Arthur laughed, a deep, booming laugh, and gave a surprisingly friendly wave of the hand as he echoed Becker’s words back to him.

 

The anomaly team, still reeling, turned to Morris.

 

“Merry Christmas,” she translated with a grin.

 


	10. Chapter 10

“Work tomorrow,” Lorraine sighed, fumbling her keys and eventually getting the front door to her flat open. Was a clear weekend so much to ask? It was well into Sunday afternoon. She’d had only a few hours off, and everything in between had been either depressing or so surreal she still had a hazy idea that she might be having a very realistic dream. She flicked the lights on and gloomily surveyed her cold, silent flat.

 

“Mm,” her boyfriend said uncommunicatively, successfully sliding one large, cold hand under her coat, probably because her reaction always provided him with a certain amount of harmless amusement.

 

As expected, she yelped and leapt sideways, any lingering ideas about being in some kind of a dream state dispelled. “Niall!”

 

He just laughed at her, green eyes glittering, and leaned against the kitchen worktop, a patch of life and brightness on a blank canvas of a room. She hadn’t even had time to find a decent fake Christmas tree that would fit in a small London flat, let alone put any decorations up yet. “No, you don’t have work tomorrow,” Blade corrected.  


“It’s Monday,” she pointed out, nonplussed. “Tomorrow, that is.”

 

“You have the day off. Lester’s not going in tomorrow, I heard off Lyle.” Blade drew her close to him, and rested his chin on her shoulder. He kept his cold, gloveless hands well away from any warm skin. “He said to pass the message on. Hart and Temple and Maitland are all hibernating, Miss Lewis has booked herself a day at a spa, Lester’s either asleep or –”

 

“Let’s not,” Lorraine said firmly, preferring not to pry into her boss’s love life, and also deeply suspicious of the detailed nature of Blade’s information.

 

Blade chuckled; she felt the vibration of it spreading through his chest. “- whatever. Basically, everyone’s taking off for a day.”

 

“James must be in a good mood,” Lorraine remarked, stifling a yawn.

 

“Christmas spirit?”

 

“Maybe,” Lorraine allowed. “He does like to think of himself as the Grinch, but he’s more of a Scrooge, really.”

 

“Bah humbug,” Blade said, startling her with literary references, and kissed her.

 

***

 

“That’s enough, Danny,” Becker said, fending off the ex-copper with a nicely judged elbow in the ribs that almost – but not quite – landed Danny in a snowdrift. “I’ve got plans for Christmas that don’t include you.”

 

Danny pulled quite a shocked face. “You aren’t dying to get back into my bed, soldier boy?”

 

“Fuck, no,” Becker said easily. “Why?”

 

Danny gave him a rakish grin that was in no way impaired by Becker just having rescued him from a rather long and embarrassing spell in his former colleagues’ custody. “I was looking forward to spending Christmas shagging you through the mattress.”

 

“Well, I wasn’t,” Becker said coolly, stuffed Danny’s helmet onto his head and tossed his keys at him. “There you go. There’s your bike. Have fun. Don’t get pulled over again. No-one will come to get you.”

 

Morris, sitting in the parked car waiting for him with a slew of printed-out journal articles around her, flashed the car’s headlights to let him know where she was. Becker raised a hand in acknowledgement, then glanced at Danny, who was staring open-mouthed.

 

“That’s your new bit on the side?” Danny demanded, contriving to sound scandalised. “Fucking Christ, he looks about eighteen!”

 

“ _She_ is twenty-six,” Becker said frostily. It wasn’t the first time Morris’s haircut and clothing had tricked people, but he was always offended on her behalf. “And she’s my closest friend.”

 

Danny goggled at him, and then straightened, an offended, mocking tilt to his thin mouth. “Gone straight, then? Decided you prefer tits to arse?”

 

“Nope,” Becker said, maintaining calm. “Morris and I collectively decided we needed some self-respect in our lives. So we’re spending Christmas with her family and without significant others, and my arse is a Quinn-free zone, and _if you ever talk about my best friend like that again your feet will not touch the fucking floor do you understand me_.”   

 

“Erk,” said Danny, assisted by Becker’s grip on the collar of his coat. “Yep. Crystal.”

 

“Good,” Becker said, and dropped him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and smiled at Danny, who looked confused, cross, and also, somehow, smaller and less impressive. “Merry Christmas, Quinn. And a happy New Year.”

 

***

 

“You know what fits the descriptions of the Questing Beast perfectly, don’t you?” said Sarah. “The Andrewsarchus.”

 

“Really?” Jenny said, far more interested than she’d expected to be. She curled her feet under her, and glanced briefly out of the window behind Sarah’s head. It was snowing heavily, and she had a strong suspicion that Sarah would be needing her spare bedroom. “So you’re saying that the Andrewsarchus we dealt with was the Questing Beast of Arthurian legend?”

 

“Well, it’s a big ask,” Sarah answered cautiously, stretching out on the elegant soft blue sofa in Jenny’s living room and gesturing with her glass of wine. Jenny noted that despite the occasional extravagance of her movements, she hadn’t spilt a drop. “But given that you and the rest of the team seem to have met the actual _King Arthur_ – I am _so_ jealous, by the way – I don’t think it’s going too far.”

 

Jenny laughed and coloured a little. “You know I didn’t meet him, not really.”

 

“Still.” Sarah leant forward, eyes shining, wearing a conspiratorial, mischievous smile. “You saw him, didn’t you?”

 

“Briefly,” Jenny allowed, running a finger around the rim of her own wine glass.

 

“Tell me,” Sarah said. “Tell me everything. The reports aren’t available for me to read yet – such a pain, they always are when it isn’t anything interesting!”

 

“You don’t need to get back soon, do you?” Jenny demurred. “I mean, look.” She indicated the seasonally-appropriate, but nonetheless hellish for travel, weather.

 

Sarah glanced at it briefly, but then looked straight back at Jenny, all her focus on the other woman. “It doesn’t matter, I’ll manage. If it gets too dreadful, I’ll… think of something.”

 

“You’re very welcome to stay, you know,” Jenny offered. “We could do brunch tomorrow if it won’t let up. I’m not a great cook, but I have yet to poison anyone.”

 

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Sarah said, and her mouth was curling up at one corner and there was a new, interested light in her eyes. “And you know, I’d like that. If that’s all right with you, of course.”

 

“Please,” Jenny said. “It’s lovely to have a proper chance to chat with you, outside work.”

 

***

 

Lester let himself into the flat and collapsed onto a sofa next to Lyle, who had his feet up on the coffee table and a book in his hands. His daughter, who was chatting to one of her friends on the phone, came and put a glass of mulled wine into his hands, absent-mindedly hugged him one-armed, and then wandered away into her room, delivering a scathing appraisal of someone called Liam’s love-life to whoever she was talking to.

 

Lester sipped at the mulled wine in silence for a few minutes, then sighed and let his head fall back against the sofa. Lyle grinned, and squeezed his free hand hard, and Lester let himself lean into his partner and enjoy a few minutes of peace, aided by excellent mulled wine. Obviously Liz had been experimenting with the recipe again.

 

“Liz got a _Merlin_ box set in the Secret Santa,” Lyle began.

 

“ _No_ ,” Lester said firmly, and Lyle just laughed.

 

***

 

Stephen dumped his backpack on the kitchen table and put the kettle on.

 

“Hell of a weekend,” Ryan remarked, dropping into one of the chairs and watching as Stephen fetched down mugs and teabags from the cupboard.

 

“You couldn’t make it up,” Stephen agreed, and shook his head. “ _King Arthur_.”

 

“You loved it,” Ryan said, and Stephen looked round to see his boyfriend grinning knowingly at him.

 

He squashed a smile. “Well, maybe.”

 

Ryan let this blatant understatement go without comment, and put the shopping bag he’d had hidden in the boot on the table.

 

Stephen stared at it for a few moments, then flicked a very expressive eyebrow at him. He was well aware that their fridge was as stocked up as it was ever going to get, thanks to Ryan’s precision with a shopping list. “Tom?”

 

“Mince pies,” Ryan said. “I know you like them, and I had to do some shopping this morning, so I thought… why not?”

 

To be more accurate, Stephen had mentioned it once, last Christmas, off-the-cuff, and had never uttered a sentence on the subject since. Ryan had remembered. Stephen felt warm, and knew it was nothing to do with the vagaries of their heating (although that was turned up ridiculously high, and Stephen was going to have to hunt out the thermostat at some point). “Thanks,” he said, and his voice came out unusually soft.

 

Ryan shrugged and smiled at him, rocking back on his chair. “It was nothing.”

 

Stephen let this pass, and tore open the plastic packaging, popping a sugar-topped little pastry into his mouth whole. He offered the box to Ryan, and Ryan took one and sensibly bit into it without trying to eat the whole thing in one go.

 

“You’re covered in icing sugar,” he remarked.

 

Stephen licked his lips and went for another mince pie. He’d arrived back from the anomaly drenched and muddy to the knees; he didn’t really care about the icing sugar, and neither did Ryan. “Could be worse.”

 

Ryan grinned. “True.” He got up and stretched. “I’m going to go and do something about the radiators before we both roast.”

 

“Good idea.” The kettle boiled, and Stephen poured hot water into the waiting mugs. “Tea down here for you when you’re done.”

 

“Only be a moment,” Ryan said, and kissed him. “You taste like mince pies.”

 

“All part of the spirit of Christmas,” Stephen said, and picked up yet another one. He was hungry: lunch had been way too long ago, and dinner had been non-existent, and mince pies tasted like Christmas and holidays and finally being happy again to him, so he was going to eat as many as he damn well pleased.

 

“It’s a good thing I like mince pies, then, isn’t it?” Ryan said, and Stephen smiled.

 


End file.
